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.