‘When Migrants Become Messengers’

European-funded information and awareness-raising campaigns aimed at combatting migrant smuggling and discouraging African youth from migrating have become an increasingly important aspects of European migration governance.

A lot of recent research has drawn attention to the increasing militarisation and securitisation of European externalisation efforts in the Euro-African borderlands. Yet, to get a fuller picture of the effects and implications of contemporary European-driven borderwork in Africa, we also need to pay attention to how Europe’s migration awareness campaigns aim to mobilise the emotions of their target audiences as a means of dissuading irregular migration.

In the article: ‘When Migrants Become Messengers’: Affective Borderwork and Aspiration Management in Senegal, published in the journal Geopolitics, Ida Marie Savio Vammen explores the local effects of such emotion driven campaigns in Senegal.

The article follows one of the many recent awareness campaigns as it moves on a caravan tour along the coastal area North of Senegal’s capital Dakar. From this area thousands of migrants travelled by sea to reach the Spanish Canary Islands during the so-called ‘boat crisis’ in the mid-2000s, before the Spanish government and Frontex border control initiatives put a hold on this route. Yet, persistent rumours indicated that the Canary Island route was about to open up again.

The article pays particular attention to how affect and emotions are used in migration awareness campaigns and how local communities respond to this European-driven form of affective borderwork.

Such ‘aspiration management’ works to instil a sense in would-be Senegalese migrants that their hopes of migration to Europe are both dangerous and futile. Affective borderwork works at a different level than other border activities connected to legal and physical migration control. Instead of giving potential migrants factual knowledge about their rights, safe migration routes, or ways to qualify for a visa to travel legally to Europe, they cultivate particular emotions and morally-embedded geographies, to promote a self-regulating border in the minds and bodies of people.

The article also shows that the campaign design makes return migrants the key messengers and effectively depoliticising and conceal European interests.

The article is part of the Geopolitics special issue: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands coming out in 2021, edited by Hans Lucht, Signe Cold-Ravnkilde and Ida Marie Savio Vammen from the Borderwork project at DIIS.

The collection of articles brings together leading scholars with unique empirical insights across different disciplines to shed new light on emerging borderwork struggles and states of constrained existence in the shadow of EU border externalization – and the local pushback they generate on the African continent.