Contested Strategies of Migration Governance: Visible Actors and Invisible Discourses of Information Campaigns in Senegambia

Abstract

This paper explores the macro and micro trajectories linking funders, providers, disseminators and target audiences in the production, reception, appropriation or refusal of information campaigns targeting West African countries. Two different empirical studies exploring the perceptions of information campaigns by migrants, first-line practitioners, policymakers, and journalists, have enabled us to identify the persistence of colonial approaches in the symbolic bordering of South-North mobility. On the one hand, westernised school curricula and EU-focused media fuel positive imaginaries regarding Europe; on the other hand, information campaigns summon to encourage immobility in potential movers by ignoring the difficult conditions in their countries of origin. Competing narratives about undocumented migration all struggle to take into account the fact that legal routes are a high threshold and inaccessible to most (potential) movers.