Paper short abstract:

This paper views migration management campaigns in The Gambia through containment development, which aims to geographically localize African’s desires and imaginations. Grounded in an aspirations-capability lens, the psychological impacts of the EU's efforts to impose a sedentary bias is presented.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the results of ethnographic field work undertaken in the Gambia, West Africa from 2018 through 2022. Border externalization measures are having dire consequences for the youth of the Gambia. Interviewees in this study commented that (containment) development initiatives tend to be in only a few select communities and not available in many rural locations. Against the backdrop of Gambians pleading for more open visa acquisition, the EU is far more likely to spend their time and money working on campaigns to do just the opposite: keep Gambians sedentary. This paper views migration management campaigns through the critical lens of containment development, which aims to geographically localize African’s desires and imaginations, to the extent that they are being subjected to border controls that discriminate and dehumanize irregular migrants. Gambian youth are making choices to take dangerous routes to Europe and other international destinations because visas are elusive and their economic prospects at home remain bleak. This work is grounded in an aspirations-capability lens, illustrating the psychological impacts of involuntary immobility that has resulted from containment development imposed by border externalization efforts in West Africa. This work additionally contributes to the recent and growing literature on cognitive immobility in the sense that Gambians in this study described in detail their feelings of mental entrapment as a consequence of border control measures. Bettering the understanding of the connections between desire, motives, actions and deprivations will allow us to consider migration as mobility justice.

Paper short abstract:

EU-funded information campaigns continue to gain momentum. However, little is known on how EU-sponsored narratives interact with or impact locally produced narratives on migration and Europe. This paper shows how locally produced migration narratives interact with EU-funded narratives in The Gambia.

Paper long abstract:

Information campaigns funded by the EU or its member states are a tool increasingly used to deter potential migrants from coming to Europe. While scholars have already analysed different aspects of the set-up and conduct of such campaigns, there is still a gap in our knowledge of how such EU-sponsored campaigns interact with or impact local narratives on migration and Europe. Building upon extensive fieldwork including focus groups and interviews in the Gambia, this article looks at how (potential) migrants perceive and react to these EU-funded information campaigns. It examines the wider narratives on the topics which these campaigns seek to influence (i.e., on migration; the migratory route; opportunities at home and life in Europe). The article shows that the narrative of (potential) migrants in the Gambia has remained largely detached from the ones promoted by EU(-funded) actors, albeit some exceptions exist. It outlines some wider reflections upon how structural factors making individuals migrate actually interact with such information campaigns and migration narratives.

Keywords : information campaigns, EU, migration, migration drivers, migration narratives

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with how returnees perceive the (il)legitimacy of certain capitalist logics embedded in The Gambia's Migrants as Messengers sensitisation project, constituting what we call a moral economy of voice.

Paper long abstract:

Returnees share their experiences of migration in awareness-raising campaigns. While recognising these campaigns’ industrialisation, the literature has approached their ‘politics of voice’, entailing the bending of migrant stories for migration control. To understand how these bent stories are commodified, we relate the notions of politics of voice and moral economy, foregrounding the normative clashes engendered by returnees’ perception of the (il)legitimacy of certain capitalist logics in the industry of awareness-raising. Through the analytical lens we call ‘moral economy of voice’, we scrutinised data arising from our ethnographic study of the Migrants as Messengers (MaM) project run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in The Gambia since 2019. This analysis highlighted three constituting aspects of the moral economy of voice, namely returnees’ grievance for being cast as voluntary workers by IOM; resentment at the product of their work being appropriated by third parties; and opposition to IOM’s conditional support to their independent communication. Our analysis shows that the commodification mechanisms of returnee stories are as contentious as their discursive bending. In the light of this, we advocate that any sort of engagement offered the returnees stand on fair grounds and allow them to express their stories’ full extent.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on interviews conducted in Dakar and Niamey, this paper analyses the discourses of intermediaries involved in the dissemination of EU migration information campaigns in West Africa. It uncovers the conflicting rationalities mobilized by these actors to give meaning to their action.

Paper long abstract:

The European Union (EU) and its Member States have been funding « migration information campaigns (MICs) » to deter irregular immigration since the 1990s. These campaigns contribute to spread a sedentarist discourse towards third-country citizens labelled as « potential migrants » by trying to convince them to either stay and succeed « at home », or to return « voluntarily » to their country of origin. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Dakar and Niamey between 2017 and 2021, this paper analyses the discourses of local and international intermediaries involved in the dissemination of MICs in West Africa. Doing so, it aims to uncover the conflicting rationalities mobilized by these actors to give meaning to their action, build coalitions and legitimize their role in a context of increased competition for the resources associated with the « migration industry » (Hernandes-Leon, 2013). Based on the theory of public policy instrumentation (Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2007), the paper shows that the three-step chain of delegation that characterizes the implementation of EU-funded MICs in West Africa offers successive levels of translation of their meanings and goals, thus providing the opportunity for many actors with divergent, or even conflicting, agendas to appropriate this instrument and exploit it « from below ». Ultimately, MICs represent a tool of « remote border control » (Zolberg, 1997) so ambiguous in its policy objective that it invites us to go beyond the question of (non) resistances (Hirschman, 1970; Scott, 1990) to the externalization of EU migration policy.

Paper long abstract:

European states increasingly fund migration information campaigns in West African countries to discourage youth from migrating irregularly to Europe. The making of campaigns counts on a variety of actors, including local staff members of NGOs and IOs in origin countries responsible to carry out campaign activities. Yet, little is known on the actual functioning of campaigns on the ground and how campaign implementers perform their tasks. Despite studies on information campaigns have burgeoned in recent years, these mainly look at campaigns as instrument to manage migration and create borders or have focused on quantitative analysis to evaluate the impact campaigns have on youth’s aspiration to migrate. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal observing the implementation of migration campaigns, this paper employs a performativity lens to show how campaign implementers enable the borderwork in their daily activities while at the same time they make use of the ambiguity campaigns create. We find that local staff ‘plays the part’ by embodying campaign’s message and executing practical tasks; they turn their position to their own advantage by finding opportunities for personal gain; and they develop strategies of noncompliance and withdrawal that allow them to counter campaign’s imaginaries. This paper contributes to the literature by combining literature on brokerage from the anthropology of development, on performativity and literature on migration campaigns.

Paper short abstract:

IOM's WAKA Well website is a campaign designed to provide African people with info about local opportunities and migration-related risks. By means of a multimodal discourse analysis, the article analyses its structure and content to study the meaning-making processes embedded in its realisation.

Paper long abstract:

In order to control, deter or dissuade unauthorised migration, stricter border-control measures and securitisation policies have increasingly been adopted, by EUrope, U.S.A. and Australia above all. One of the most recently employed strategies consists in delivering information (or awareness) campaigns to potential migrants in areas with high emigration rates. While on the one hand these campaigns aim at informing potential irregular migrants about the dangers and obstacles they might encounter, on the other they are inscribed into a broader tendency to externalise migration management, with the purpose of tackling the issue at its roots by preventing migrants from leaving. Most of the EU-funded campaigns, with the collaboration of international and transnational organisations, have been targeting central and western Africa, by means of social events, discussions, printed paper, cinema, TV, radio, internet and social networks. In 2019 the International Organization for Migration launched WAKA Well, an innovative campaign in the form of a website designed to provide young African people with information about local opportunities and risks associated to irregular migration. This article investigates the structure and content of the WAKA Well website by means of a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) methodology. MMDA stems from a social semiotic approach to discourse suitable for studying multimedia contents made of language, image, music, sound, texture and gesture. Thus, the study aims at exploring assumptions, objectives and communicative strategies at stake in the campaign realisation, by analysing the construction of meaning across its different webpages and the logico-semantic relations between elements on the website.

Paper short abstract:

This paper juxtaposes two different cases of migration awareness campaigns in Senegal to grasp a full picture of contemporary information campaigns: a large European funded IOM information awareness campaign and a much smaller ‘Push Back Frontex’ campaign promoted by local activist.

Paper long abstract:

To stop unwanted migration, the European Union and its member states have for more than a decade invested in information and awareness campaigns in West Africa, often in close collaboration with International Organization for Migration (IOM) and donor agencies as implementing partner. Yet other actors also aim to empower and inform people about contemporary migration from below, but their information sharing practices has received much less scholarly attention. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal this paper juxtaposes two different cases of migration awareness campaigns to grasp a full picture of contemporary information campaigns: a large European funded IOM information awareness campaign and a much smaller ‘Push Back Frontex’ campaign promoted by local activist. Building on Rumford’s notion of borderwork, it explores the diverse and contradicting ways the campaigns envision and build but also deconstruct the border in the efforts to ‘empower’ the migration-decision making of local youth and their families. The paper unpacks the main message and means the two campaigns use and argue that although they share emotive communication strategies and the involvement of return migrants as key messengers, they also envision radical different (im)mobile futures for local populations. Thereby stressing how migration information campaigns both can be used to align people’s aspirations with the objectives of restrictive Western migration governance but also to actively contest such mobility regimes from below.

Paper short abstract:

Cette communication s'intéresse à l'inefficacité des campagnes de lutte contre la migration clandestine depuis la région de Kolda au Sénégal.

Paper long abstract:

Les crises des destinations africaines combinées aux difficultés d’obtention des visas pour l’Europe se sont traduites par une émigration massive, illégale et clandestine par voies maritimes ou terrestres vers la « forteresse Europe ». Dans son sillage, ce phénomène a semé la désolation avec des milliers de morts ensevelis dans le désert sahraoui ou engloutis par les vagues de l’Atlantique. Le traitement médiatique à grands renforts financiers des fonds fiduciaires de l’Union Européenne et l’implication des pays de départ à travers des campagnes de sensibilisation sur les dangers de la migration clandestine n’ont pas réussi à stopper le phénomène. Au contraire, il semble se densifier. On se propose dans cette communication de procéder à l’évaluation des outils tels que les discours et les productions artistiques produits sur cette migration à partir de la Casamance au Sénégal. Concrètement, il s’agira de mesurer l’efficacité sociale de leur contenu et leurs impacts supposés sur la communauté de départ. On s’apercevra au final que les contenus des mots et des maux de la migration n’ont pas encore réussi à déconstruire au sein des communautés les risques avérés de l’aventure migratoire clandestine. En filigrane, comprendre l’influence des discours sur la migration à partir de l’analyse de leurs contenus et mesurer leurs impacts supposés positifs ou négatifs sur la construction des représentations collectives et de l’imaginaire de la migration est ainsi l’objectif de cette communication. Ce travail est extrait d’une étude plus large sur l’industrie de la migration clandestine à partir de la Casamance au Sénégal.

Paper short abstract:

We examine how young adults in 17 diverse locations across seven African countries are exposed to migration information campaigns and perceive their messages. In our analyses we place these campaigns within richly documented contexts of influences on migration aspirations and attitudes to migration.

Paper long abstract:

Recent research on migration information campaigns have often set out with specific campaigns as the object study. From a complementary bird’s eye perspective, we seek to place such campaigns and their effects within broader dynamics of migration and development in diverse African settings. We ask how exposure to campaigns vary, how their messages are perceived, and how they interact with other influences on people’s thoughts and feelings about migration. Data were collected in Cape Verde, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Tunisia. In each country, our research covered two or three analytically selected locations and included different forms of qualitative data as well as a representative survey of the population aged 18¬–39 (N=500 per locality). The survey covered a wide range of topics related to migration and development, including a section on migration information campaigns. Between 15% and 92% of young adults in each area have been exposed to some form of migration information during the past year. The campaigns were most often perceived as telling people not to migrate, or warning against smuggling, though the whole picture of message perception is more complex. In our analysis we examine how migration aspirations and attitudes to migration may be affected by migration information campaigns. In doing so, we include consideration of other sources of information or impressions, such as having family members who live in Europe, or knowing individuals who have suffered failed migration attempts. The paper is based on the collaborative project MIGNEX, funded under the Horizon 2020 programme.