Deterrence or empowerment?

In today’s world, access to safe and legal migration is highly stratified and selective. It depends on where you come from and your economic situation, meaning that for many people around the globe, legal migration paths do not exist. In the new Research Handbook on Irregular Migration we get a comprehensive picture of cutting-edge research in 30 chapters written by leading scholars. Focusing on the movement of people that takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements, the handbook critically examines processes and dynamics that generate and reproduce migrant irregularity and discusses who may count as an irregular migrant.

Ida Marie Savio Vammen’s chapter ‘Deterrence or empowerment? Awareness and information campaigns as a migration governance tool to stop irregular migration’ focuses on how Western governments today increasingly are funding information campaigns to deter unwanted irregular migrants. The chapter shows how campaigns bring the border into the everyday spaces of local communities, often long before migrants attempt to cross any actual physical or legal boundaries. Vammen highlight how such communicative efforts can be seen as a particular, Western-driven, form of affective migration governance that aims to discipline peoples’ aspirations and behaviour through evoking emotions and responsibilizing the migrant subjects and their families.