Doing and contesting borderwork in Senegal: local implementers of migration information campaigns

ABSTRACT

European states and international organizations employ migration information campaigns to discourage African youth from trying to get to Europe without the necessary papers. Campaigns count on a variety of actors, including local staff members of Non-Governmental Organizations in origin countries. Yet, little is known about how local campaign implementers perceive and perform their tasks. This article investigates why and how Senegalese citizens help to implement campaigns in Senegal when such campaigns try to curb the very mobility they aspire to themselves. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal, where we observed how migration campaigns were organized and run, the article shows how local implementers produce borders in their daily activities while at the same time making use of the ambiguity campaigns create. We find that local campaign staffs are brokers who simultaneously reinforce and undermine ‘soft’ borders in their work of translating policy into practice. We analyze how campaigns are performed through the speech acts of local staff, which define and consolidate control over the mobility of Senegalese youth. At the same time, local implementers, in their practical and discursive labor, find fissures to contest dominant discourses and push an alternative message.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration information campaigns
• borderwork
• local brokers
• speech acts
• Senegal

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sally Wyatt, Djamila Schans and Papa Sakho for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank our research assistant Marietou Ndiaye for her work of translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval statement

Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Review Committee Inner City Faculties of Maastricht University (number ERCIC_219_01_10_2020). All names used are pseudonyms, and some personal details have been changed, or omitted, to protect participants' privacy.

Notes

1 An informal savings and credit association usually used by women in Senegal. Participants contribute equally to a common pool of money and with a system of rotation they are eligible to take the whole sum.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number 847596].