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

Introduction

European states increasingly fund information campaigns in West African countries to discourage young people from trying to migrate to Europe. On the one hand, these campaigns aim to raise awareness of the dangers of irregular migration and to help ‘potential migrants’ make informed decisions. Hence, campaigns claim to protect people before they move and to reduce migrant deaths. On the other hand, campaigns’ aim to contain migration from the global South and reduce arrivals in Europe defined them as ‘soft’ borders. Migration information campaigns thus operate in a field of tension between awareness raising and deterrence (Schans and Optekamp 2016), reflecting the dichotomies of care and control in the global governance of borders.

European-funded migration campaigns are run by a range of NGOs and international organizations among which the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the main actor. Campaigns take different forms and may involve theater performances, video testimonials, billboards, graffiti, community events, video clips, songs and social media posts. These media are used to convey the message that it is not worth risking one's life in the attempt to reach Europe and that life ‘at home’ is full of opportunities. While such messages appeal to young people's sense of responsibility, many assume that ‘potential migrants’ lack information about the dangers of irregular migration and the tough conditions undocumented migrants face in Europe. One assumption would-be migrants are not well informed is that they rely on false information from smugglers (Schans and Optekamp 2016), and the reason European states have increasingly been willing to invest in information campaigns is that they believe information from Europe will be considered more reliable than other sources of information migrants depend on.

However, research has shown that campaigns are ineffective in preventing people from moving (Browne 2015; Heller 2014). Even when would-be migrants deem information credible and are fully aware of the dangers, they tend to downplay the negative aspects of the journey and are willing to take high risks (Van Bemmel 2020). ‘Potential migrants’ also often distrust the institutions that fund and implement migration campaigns, which has encouraged these institutions to rely on local figures to act as the messengers of the campaign, on the assumption that the target audience will trust the information more if it comes from their ‘peers’. Local figures engaged in campaigns include return migrants, diaspora groups, and local influencers such as famous hip-hop artists.

Yet, campaign implementing organizations still need staff on the ground to ensure activities are realized according to project policy and objectives. In other words, they need intermediaries in countries of origin who are able to bridge the interests of campaign funders and those of the target population. However, local intermediaries face a paradoxical situation when they engage in campaigns that aim to hinder the exact mobility that they aspire to for themselves and for their fellow citizens. This article investigates this paradox by asking why Senegalese citizens help to implement campaigns in Senegal and how they perform their role of local intermediaries. In this way, we better understand the apparent contradictions underlying migration campaigns and we fill a gap in the literature on how campaigns function in places of departure (Gazzotti 2019; Pagogna and Sakdapolrak 2021). Moreover, we contribute to the literature on borderwork by identifying local staff members of campaign-implementing organizations as a new group of non-state actors doing borderwork. We consider campaign intermediaries as borderworkers in their acts of negotiating the creation of borders where borders are not desired by local populations and in the way they contribute to reconfigure, and contest, European ‘soft’ externalized borders.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted over 15 months with organizations running migration campaigns in Senegal. Senegal was chosen for this study because of the intensity of the migration campaigns that have been run in the country since 2006 when boat migration to the Canary Islands intensified following the progressive tightening of European borders (Maher 2017). Consequently, many young men lost their lives at sea in the attempt to reach Europe (Willems 2007). This migration was spurred on by precarious socio-economic conditions that have inhibited Senegalese youth from establishing independent livelihoods since the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s (Beauchemin et al. 2018; Tall and Tandian 2010). In a context where even people with a tertiary education faced challenges finding employment, migration offered Senegalese youth hope and the promise of work and social prestige beyond the uncertainty (Zingari et al. 2023). In 2007, in collaboration with the IOM, Spain launched the first migration information campaign ‘Don't risk your life for nothing’ with television advertisements in Senegal warning about the dangers of irregular migration (Schans and Optekamp 2016). The prevention and reduction of irregular migration from Senegal has been a priority for the EU and individual member states ever since, resulting in numerous campaigns in Senegal that take various forms ranging from social media, to theater plays and film screenings.

Within this landscape, we chose Tekki Fii (Stay Here) as the main case study for the analysis. We chose this campaign in order to give a detailed account of how local actors position themselves in such campaigns, while giving due attention to the context within which they are embedded. Although campaings can take many forms, the detailed study of Tekki Fii sheds light on a more general question of why local actors participate in campaigns that propagate messages that limit their own mobility that they aspire to. The campaign was financed with European funding and carried out in Senegal by several NGOs. European development aid became increasingly tied to European migration governance (European Commission 2017; Jegen 2020) with many NGOs having to navigate different goals and interests. The intermediation between funders and beneficiaries is a common practice in Senegal where development projects are many and development work is seen as a springboard for political careers and a strategy for social mobility (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002).

Section one, below, discusses the literature on migration campaigns, brokerage and speech acts that build the analytical framework. The second section presents the research methodology. Section three analyses how local staff play the role of brokers to bring gains for themselves and for their community while complying with the campaign's message of immobility. Section four discusses how local staff criticize dominant campaign narratives and create alternative messages through agentic performances. For ease of exposure, we chose to present compliance and resistance to campaign initial intents as two distinct acts campaign implementers perform. This allows to show how contradictory behaviors are performed within the same campaign by the same local staff. In reality, these two acts mix and intertwine within the same events as implementers negotiate their roles in campaigns. The final section concludes.

Borderwork, brokers and translators, speech acts

Below, we consider the borderwork that local campaign implementers do and how they act as brokers and translators between policy and practice. As researchers have shown, migration information campaigns are instruments of EU border externalization (Van Dessel 2021) that are used to control unwanted migrants (Nieuwenhuys and Pécoud 2007; Pécoud 2010) by spreading affective and emotional messages to persuade them not to migrate (Heller 2014; Musarò 2019). The work that goes into such anti-migration efforts, which takes place beyond EU territorial borders, is known as ‘borderwork’ because it constructs and erases borders (Rumford 2008; Savio Vammen, Cold-Ravnkilde, and & Lucht 2022), affirming or contesting an inclusionary/exclusionary geography. Starting from the concept of borderwork, this study looks at the ‘discursive and practical labour’ (Frowd 2018) that goes into the production, maintenance, and even transgression of borders (Richter 2022). In this case, the border is enforced by the strategic circulation of information in an attempt to manage people's perceptions of migration, hence it is ‘soft’ and invisible (Williams 2020).

Borderwork as a concept recognizes the local agency of citizens, and not only of state actors, to engage in the everyday (re)production and undermining of borders across different spatial scales. Actors performing borderwork include humanitarian agencies and intergovernmental organizations such as the IOM (Andersson 2014; Frowd 2018), government return counselors (Cleton and Schweitzer 2021) and civil society actors in destination countries (Sinatti 2022), and youth leaders (Rodriguez 2019), women's associations (Bouilly 2010), and community-based agents in receiving countries (Maâ, Van Dessel, and Savio Vammen 2022). To address a gap in the literature, this research focuses on the experiential dimension of borderwork (Savio Vammen, Cold-Ravnkilde, and & Lucht 2022) by investigating how borderwork is done by Senegalese citizens who help run migration campaigns in Senegal on behalf of EU-funded NGOs and international organizations. It explores their interests and motivations to engage in border management as well as to contest it. The importance of considering non-state actors as borderworkers lies in understanding their efforts to reconfigure or contest state-enforced borders and in their transformative work that may challenge relations of power within migration regimes.

Studies have pointed out the dual nature of borderwork, the opposing forces that are simultaneously present that make it by nature contradictory (Sinatti 2022). Engaging in borderwork inevitably entails both constructing and resisting border controls. For example, while youth leaders in Senegal actively contribute to the execution of anti-migration campaigns, they refrain from encouraging others to stay (Rodriguez 2019) in a context where migration is often considered the better option (Alpes 2012). In the same vein, migrants who send messages to persuade others not to migrate may oppose campaign control objectives because of their own experience of border violence (Maâ, Van Dessel, and Savio Vammen 2022). Yet, how the socio-structural position of such intermediaries shapes their borderwork has received little attention, though exceptions can be found in the studies on ‘peerness’ between migrant intermediaries and the target audience of migration communication activities (Maâ, Van Dessel, and Savio Vammen 2022; Vammen 2021). The Senegalese field staff who are employed by NGOs and international organizations perform borderwork while they navigate the interests of campaign initiators and campaign audience. They must take into account the position they occupy at the interface of different world views and knowledge systems and acknowledge their role as translators between international agencies and local communities (Long 2001; Mosse and Lewis 2006).

We consider the Senegalese citizens working on EU-funded migration campaigns to be ‘brokers’. The concept of broker was developed to study the work of intermediation of local actors in development aid projects in the global South (Mosse and Lewis 2006). The primary task of brokers is to translate the problems and needs of local communities in terms that coincide with the solutions advanced by development institutions (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002). Brokers’ ability to translate from one register to another defines them as ‘translators’ (Mosse and Lewis 2006). Translators need rhetorical and relational skills to translate contradictory interests and values in ways that allow different meanings to become understandable and useful for actors on both sides of the brokerage chain (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002; Bräuchler, Knodel, and Röschenthaler 2021; Epple 2021; Knodel 2021). Thus the work of translation in development projects produces congruence between problems and interventions (Mosse and Lewis 2006). The concept of translation is useful for understanding how campaigns come into being through the translation work of local campaign implementers to turn campaign policy into acts. In this way we investigate their agency to reiterate or transform campaign intentions. Ethnographies of development show in the work of brokers the coexistence of ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts (Scott 1990). The former refers to brokers’ capacity ‘to conform to the roles ascribed to them by dominant discourses’ (Rossi 2006, 29), needed to maintain official representations and the legitimacy of the project. Brokers’ abidance to project goals preserves their social and professional identities and may improve opportunities for their personal gain in the form of economic revenue, social recognition, and professional advancement (Bräuchler, Knodel, and Röschenthaler 2021). The hidden transcript instead refers to discourses and practices that validate, counter or transform the public transcript (Scott 1990). Brokers do not simply follow normative scripts (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002). They are active agents who translate project implementation strategically according to their own goals and resources and in interaction with others on the ground (Bierschenk 1988). Brokers in development learn ‘to play the game’ according to a variety of rules (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002, 21) and to benefit from the ambiguity that comes from their structural position and their work of translation.

We use the concept of performative speech act to analyze how translation is done. Speech act allows uncovering how brokers manifest their acts of translation and the hidden transcripts these acts entail. The notion that language is ‘performative’ was first introduced in the field of linguistics to indicate that language ‘does action’ and may bring about change (Austin 1962). In gender studies, Butler later extended the idea, using the concept of ‘speech act’ to analyze gender as a socially constructed process that proceeds through repetitive public, performative, bodily, and linguistic acts (Butler 1988). The performance of speech acts is repeated through time, resulting in the consolidation of norms that constrain gender identity and enforce a system of control. Yet, acts can be repeated differently through dissonant or disruptive gestures that break from conventional representations. In fact, the very character of the performative resides in the possibility of contesting a norm's reified status (Butler 1988) through subversive repetition that produces counter discourses. In this way speech acts have the power to contest and transform hegemonic representations of gender.

Recent ethnographic studies have used the lens of performativity to analyze practices that return migrants engage in to appropriate the ‘returnee identity’ (Shaidrova 2023) and to narrate themselves as agentic while navigating normative discourses of return and masculinity (Strijbosch, Mazzucato, and Brunotte 2023). Looking at brokers’ speech acts helps us to better understand how they enact ‘soft’ borders by reproducing campaign discourses of mobility control and how they see themselves acting in accordance with such control measures. At the same time, analysis of their performative speech acts explains how staff members make use of their agentic translation and ambivalent position to subvert and contest the dominant discourse of migration campaigns and to push an alternative message. This study sheds light on hidden components of migration campaigns important to understand how campaigns are translated into the different goals and ambitions of the many people they bring together and how local campaign implementers’ work of translation reinforces or transforms campaign policy.

Methodology

This article is based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Senegal from February 2021 to May 2022 by the first author while the second author obtained the research grant and facilitated the embedding of the research within a Senegalese academic institution. Both authors wrote the article together. Fieldwork was conducted in urban and rural areas where migration information campaigns were organized. The main field sites were the cities of Dakar, Thiès, Mbour, Ziguinchor, and Saint Louis. The periphery of Dakar and villages in the region of Thiès also hosted campaigns regularly. Access was secured first by approaching civil servants of the Dutch government, responsible for the funding of one major campaign in Senegal. They facilitated access to the team of the IOM running campaign activities in Senegal. The positionality of the field researcher was also key to accessing campaigns. Campaigns were often implemented by NGOs that the field researcher was familiar with because of previous working experience in the development sector in Senegal. The researcher's relationship with campaign coordinators and the data collected were therefore influenced by the researcher's general knowledge of NGO operations and of the position of local staff within them.

Fieldwork involved long-term immersion in the daily lives of campaigns, their makers, and participants. For this article, we focus on a sample of twenty local staff, fourteen male and six female, aged from their mid-twenties to early forties, who were employed by the IOM, NGOs or by the enterprise Seefar to coordinate and assist the implementation of migration campaigns in Senegal. Eighteen were Senegalese, while two had other African nationalities, hired under local contracts. They had similar socio-economic backgrounds and their education varied, although most had acquired a bachelor's degree from a Senegalese university and eleven participants had a master degree, four of which were obtained from universities abroad. Many of them had a good command of English and management skills, and their expertise was in the fields of administration, communication, development, economics, and territorial governance. Despite being highly qualified, the majority considered mobility hard to access and did not travel regularly outside of Senegal. They all gained a monthly salary and had short-term contracts, ranging from six to thirty-six months, depending on the duration of the campaign they were recruited for. By the end of the campaign, only five people in our sample were working for the same organization as at the start of our fieldwork, of which four were working for NGOs. As stability of work may influence one's perspective on the campaigns, each time we refer to a participant, we specify the sort of contract they had.

The main methods of data collection were participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. The latter took place at the organizations’ headquarters or while sharing meals, accommodation, and car trips with staff members. Interviews were conducted at respondents’ places of work, at their homes, and in cafés and restaurants. Ethical clearance was obtained from the Ethics Review Committee of our university. Names used for participants are pseudonyms and informed consent was gained orally as a continuous process during the fieldwork period. Moreover, the field researcher was embedded within a local university and her local supervisor informed her about ethically accepted practices for conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal.

At migration campaign sites, which included community centers, neighborhood open-air areas, and the headquarters of cultural associations, participant observation focused on campaign activities in their diverse forms. These included community public events with a broader audience such as debates, graffiti-making, theater plays, movie screenings, concerts, forums and workshops as well as radio broadcasts and podcast recordings. Return migrants were often invited to volunteer testimonials of their migration experiences and engage in discussions with the audience on migration issues. The main targeted audience was young people, although the community at large of the locality where campaign events took place was encouraged to participate. In some localities the audience was made mostly of women and children. Campaigns lasted a day or sometimes took place over several days as part of a broader program.

The campaign Tekki Fii was chosen as the main case study for this article to be able to deeply contextualize the performance of campaign brokers. While our analysis focuses on the work of a campaign coordinator, Mr. Faye, our findings are supported by data collected at other campaigns implemented in Senegal. Among those are the Migrants as Messengers campaign, implemented by the IOM with Dutch funding and Projet Migrant directed by the private company Seefar and funded by the Spanish government. Tekki Fii started at the end of 2020 and lasted twenty months, had a multi-actor approach and included campaign staff with diverse contractual arrangements. While the NGO where Mr. Faye worked, oversaw the implementation of the project following the specifications in the project document, campaign messages, media, and interventions were supposedly defined by a network of civil society actors consisting of local entreprenurs and return migrants. Yet, the campaign gave vague instructions on how exactly these local actors were meant to discourage migration and on what their actual messages should have been. This network of local actors was not just the means through which the campaign was performed, but also part of the target group that the campaign was aimed at.

Data were collected in English, French, or Italian and written in field notes. When public campaign activities happened in Wolof, limiting the researcher's understanding of the observed interactions, audio recordings were taken which, were later translated to French by an assistant. Analysis proceeded through an initial phase of manual open coding built on a selection of themes and sub-themes emerging from the data. Coding was also informed by our analytical framework which became more refined after repeated readings.

Doing borderwork: playing the part of campaign broker

Mr. Faye was a coordinator of the migration information campaign Tekki Fii. This was not his first assignment in the organization; but it was the first time he had led a communication program. He was the only member of the staff available, so he could not choose whether to carry out the task despite his discomfort and lack of familiarity with the field of campaigns. In fact, when the campaign was organized, Mr. Faye had no other duties for the NGO, leaving his only one option if he wanted to stay. Amongst his tasks, Faye was responsible for the organization of a two-day forum on ‘youth employment and migration’. The forum was structured around panel discussions and artistic performances, and the aim was to raise awareness about the risks of irregular migration and inform youth about alternatives that would allow them to succeed professionally in Senegal.

In order to organize this forum, Mr. Faye arranged a meeting with members of the campaign network. The meeting gathered representatives of three urban culture associations, the president of one artistic association, one member of a returnees’ association, and one radio journalist. During the meeting, Faye stated that the role of his NGO was to assist and by no means to replace the local actors in deciding how to carry out the event. He explained that the aim was to stay faithful to the project guidelines in enacting an awareness-raising campaign. In his view, this meant that the goal was not to make a ‘big concert’ for pure entertainment, even though some famous rappers had been invited to perform, but ‘to sensitize’ youth. Faye proposed that the panels focus on themes of entrepreneurship and ‘successful stories’ as alternatives to migration. This suggestion followed the project documentation and the discussions the local actors had previously had.

That day the main concerns of the organizing team were with setting the agenda and discussing practicalities. The content of the messages to disseminate, the script of the plays, and the details of panel discussions were ignored and remained vague. Faye formulated the titles of the panels and decided which panelists to invite in consultation with the journalist.

The practical and discursive work Mr. Faye performed to translate the Tekki Fii forum from institutional intention to action was an act of borderwork that he used for personal and communal advantage. The vignette above describes one practical step Faye took to ensure the forum occurred according to the project's guidelines: he mobilized representatives of the campaign multi-actor network to discuss the logistics and terms of reference for the event. This was his task as local broker of the campaign. In initiating the meeting, he sought to further the campaign's objective of making local actors the messengers of awareness-raising and deterring discourses. By doing so, he was following the official instructions of the campaign to propagate the idea that migration is an undesirable and dreadful choice. He also stimulated the interest of cultural associations involved in participating in the forum in ways that coincided with the solutions that the campaign proposed, which involved passing on trustworthy, easy-to-access, and appealing information on irregular migration. In bringing together social actors, Faye's act of translation assisted the campaign to reach its goals. His actions can thus be seen as borderwork (Rumford 2008). He helped to produce and maintain symbolic borders that kept Senegalese youth in their country of origin. In fact, the multi-actor network constituted part of the infrastructure on which borders rely for their functioning (Frowd 2018). Faye enabled this network, thus contributing to curbing youth mobility and enhancing externalized European borders.

By promoting the participation of civil society groups and making them accountable for the event, Faye embraced the project's initial idea that members of the campaign network are potential migrants themselves, hence one of the target groups of the campaign, and he enlisted civil society groups in borderwork. The campaign was designed to make this network of local actors responsible for caring for their peers by making them aware of the risks they would encounter when migrating without papers. However, the intersection of humanitarian principles of care with border control, intrinsic in migration campaign interventions, makes the work that Senegalese civil society groups performed simultaneously borderwork, part of the effort to produce and maintain borders (Frowd 2018). As such, not only are migrants and returnees used as human deterrents (Andersson 2014; Vammen 2021) but also grassroots groups like cultural associations and social actors like journalists.

Nonetheless, as a development worker, who, in his institutional capacity, implemented campaign activities, Faye knew he acted as broker between different groups. Using his ability to translate, he matched the interests of the project with the interests of local associations in such a way that the latter could benefit. He was able to redistribute project resources as demanded by the leader of one cultural association so that artistic performances would receive more funding than was initially decided on. Moreover, he let the cultural associations decide on the performers to invite and the songs to sing, as well as the audience to target, to ensure performers gained visibility and rewards.

In the meeting to organize the forum, Faye appropriated campaign discourse: his language reproduced the official script and campaign policy delineated in the project guidelines. These stated the commitment to provide ‘correct and complete’ information about existing opportunities in Senegal and about the risks and failures of irregular migration using the participatory process as communication strategy. Such discourse argues for sedentary life in Senegal and the containment of migration. Faye made clear that the members of the campaign network would take the lead in realizing the forum, while the NGO was there to assist. The multi-actor network and the NGO had a common goal, ‘to sensitize’, Faye stated. In saying this, he decided to conform to the role of broker ascribed to him by dominant policy discourses (Rossi 2006) and validated the campaign. He chose to abide by the rules that campaign implementing institutions had set and like other coordinators he actively promoted the campaign message in different ways. One simple way was by wearing t-shirts and carrying gadgets with the logo ‘stay here’ during public campaign events. According to Tafa, a young man employed by one of the NGOs implementing Tekki Fii, wearing campaign logos was to safeguard the staff's professional position rather than claiming public recognition for their work and its meaning. He, like others, wore campaign-branded t-shirts exclusively at campaign events, as he was expected to. In his private life he did not desire to embody campaign words and symbols nor to be associated by others to the campaign message. It would not make him proud. Instead, he used the t-shirts’ as pyjamas. Thereby, local staff reduced their role to mere project implementation and made their ability to influence the process seem irrelevant, as Faye said:

I had a programme of activities to do, and I was just carrying these out. (…) There are certain rules to follow, and you work to reach the indicators. It is what you need to give an account of. (Faye, NGO long-term contract, 15 March 2022)

At the same time, Faye, like other local campaign staff, benefited from the work he did in various ways, one being economically. In taking on the coordination of the Tekki Fii campaign and the forum, Faye acquiesced to the requests of his NGO that he goes beyond his field of expertise in order to keep his post, and with it he secured a salary. Thus, campaign work represents for staff an opportunity for their economic improvement. This was also acknowledged by Ibrahima, a Senegalese man working for the same campaign:

We are a piece of the game. You are obliged to play to get by, to make a living. If you do this, you have opportunities to find a job. It is problematic. You feel a little bad. You go against your beliefs. The NGO pushes you to do it. (…) Some people think that you gain a lot in the NGOs. But then the project ends and bye … . (Ibrahima, NGO short-term contract, 2 April 2022)

In a country with high unemployement rates, the work of broker is one of the rare opportunities to maintain an already acquired social position (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002). Ibrahima was moved by self-interest to enhance his chances of keeping his job and finding future employment. Despite the precarious conditions and feeling compelled to perform according to specific instructions, Ibrahima took on ‘the campaign game’ and complied with its rules, with the aspiration for economic recognition. In his personal trajectory brokerage remained a livelihood strategy, despite the vulnerability given by his short-term contract.

As brokers, Faye and Ibrahima aligned themselves strategically with the work of campaign coordinators. They pursued their own perspectives and goals (Bierschenk 1988), one being economic security, though this sometimes came at the cost of their own beliefs. Ibrahima believed migration campaigns were neither effective nor favorable, but rather followed ‘a logic of domination and exploitation’; yet he worked to implement them. This paradoxical situation makes him a morally ambiguous subject positioned in between opportunism and struggle for change (Bräuchler, Knodel, and Röschenthaler 2021).

Local campaign implementers could also gain immaterial resources from their work. Hammed was an IOM local staff employed with a short-term contract to assist the implementation of the information campaign Migrants as Messengers (MaM) in Senegal. He was able to gain professionally and personally from the meetings he had with local mayors on a mission to inform them about the upcoming occurrence of MaM in their villages. The mission gave him the opportunity to sharpen his argumentative skills, using both French and Wolof, in convincing local authorities of the relevance of the campaign. Such skills promised to advance his career as broker (Bierschenk, Chauveau, and De Sardan 2002). In addition, visits were occasions to gain knowledge of local authorities’ perceptions of the IOM and their understanding of its work. He saw this, as well as the knowledge he gained from debates on migration with local communities at campaign events, as a source for personal growth rather than a necessity for his job.

The practical and discursive labor campaign staff performed shows the contradictory intentions of campaigns both to protect people and to control their mobility, which places their borderwork between development and securitization (Frowd 2018). During a visit to a local municipality soon to host the MaM campaign, local IOM employees said that ‘it is good to inform’, ‘it is a moral duty to inform on risks’, ‘it is not about forbidding’, ‘life is better at home’, and ‘returnees are better messengers’. The repetition and enactment of these slogans actualized the campaign and reinforced the campaign's ambiguous purposes, but also justified the need for campaign intervention. The continuous funding of campaigns consolidated the norm that people in Senegal must be guided to make better decisions regarding migration and should be encouraged to stay in Senegal. Over time, and with the continuity of campaigns implemented in Senegal, this norm generated what Hammed called ‘a culture of sensitization’ among the Senegalese population. The promotion of this ‘culture’ had implications for campaign staff who were meant to explain what sensitizing entailed. Hence, by involving local authorities and members of cultural associations to act as messengers who are familiar with sensitization and had supposedly internalized its message, both Faye and Hammed in their work of translation were able to leave parts of their communication vague. In the meeting to organize the forum Faye did not explain what ‘sensitization’ entailed, he failed to make the ‘project guidelines’ explicit, and he overlooked the content of panels and theater scripts. Similarly, when informing local mayors, Hammed did not elaborate on what the message of ‘the migrants’ was. With messages often vague one must question to which extent the local populations discipline themselves to fit European migration priorities.

The next section starts by describing how the campaign forum unfolded and continues with an analysis of speech acts by campaign implementers who contested the dominant message and pushed for alternatives.

Contesting migration campaigns: creating an alternative message

The campaign forum happened exactly two months after Mr. Faye had held the organizational meeting with representatives of the campaign network described above. The forum took place in an urban highly populated area. It was a public event, though most of the participants had received personal invitations. It gathered together the campaign funder, NGOs, Senegalese territorial authorities, representatives of civil society organizations, cultural associations, and young people from the area. Faye had assigned the task of inviting the audience of young people to a city councilor, while he invited local authorities such as the mayor and others and guest speakers. The representative of the European funding agency was also present.

On the morning of the first day, Faye was busy managing the practicalities and logistics of the event, so he did not attend the first panel discussions; he did not feel his presence was needed – discussion was going to happen anyway. Afterwards a participant told him that one panelist, a successful Senegalese female entrepreneur Faye had invited, had delivered what seemed to be an inappropriate speech. She had condemned western countries for exploiting African resources and imposing international cooperation agreements only driven by their economic interests. Her tone intensified as she captured everybody's attention. Then she encouraged young people to rebel against such an unjust exploitative system and to migrate to expand their knowledge.

Her intervention raised tensions among the participants. However, Faye was convinced her provocation was exactly what made for ‘a good debate’, and ‘you cannot exclude political debate when you invite institutional figures’. After the other panelists had finished their speeches, people from the audience spoke. Some echoed the woman's criticisms. A young man encouraged youth not to hang around because, regardless of the economic hardship people might experience in Senegal, it is possible to become ‘heroes from zero’. But to achieve this, ‘we have to stop these meetings, we have to stop these workshops, these forums, if you want Senegal to be one of the most developed countries’. A male student sitting in the audience stood up to address local authorities and the forum funders: ‘I also want you to show young people the path to take to succeed; we cannot tell someone to stay here without giving them anything’.

In the afternoon of the same day, a theater troupe performed a play on migration. Faye had selected a troupe that had already created a play. He did not have the time, nor the money, to support the creation of a play from scratch, and he had simply glanced over the script rather than properly checking its content. He also knew the troupe used the so called ‘theatre forum’ approach, which entails interaction with the audience. The play, it turned out, discussed the social conditions of youth in Senegal and migration in general, and the ensuing discussion with the audience did not produce a clear message of deterrence, nor one condemning irregular migration.

Through their speech acts, local campaign staff like Faye break from the conventional discourse of migration campaigns and find ways to promote alternative messages. In their work of translation they find space for themselves and for others to perform subtle forms of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott 1990).

The agentic translation of Faye is made of speech acts that have three key features: intentional absence, selective invitations, and disinterested collaboration. Firstly, on the day of the forum, Faye did not attend the panels and appeared unconcerned about any conversation between invited speakers and the audience. The instructions he received on how to conduct the event did not specify whether he had to supervise the panels. The result of his absence, however, was a lack of control over the debate and individual contributions. Yet, the conversation he had afterwards with the participant who had told him about the entrepreneur's ‘inappropriate’ speech showed that he did not disapprove and that his absence did not imply a lack of interest about the issues being discussed at the panels. Rather, he chose not to participate to avoid being put in the position of having to intervene in order to meet the expectations of western funders and local authorities ‘to neutralize’ the tone of the debate if it would get too heated. He did not want to interrupt speakers. Consequently, different voices emerged, including those that departed from the event's aim of raising awareness about the possibilities of local employment for youth as alternatives to irregular migration. The woman entrepreneur and the two men in the audience who spoke brought attention to three interlinked issues that surround socio-economic and political debates at the national and international level: first, the unsound neoliberal economic policies that cause socioeconomic disparities in Senegal; second, the ineffectiveness of migration campaign forums to contribute to the country's development; and third, the injustice that campaigns perpetuate by attempting to keep youth in Senegal while not providing them with the means to make a living ‘at home’. Their speeches ignored the humanitarian and migration management agendas of campaigns, instead breaking with the intended messages and denouncing the injustice of a hegemonic system that increases vulnerabilities for the Senegalese population without proposing solutions.

The second feature to notice about Faye's speech acts is the selectivity of his invitations. As campaign coordinator, Faye had some discretion regarding whom to invite, and he chose to encourage the participation of foreign and local institutional figures. According to Faye, their presence inevitably led the audience to raise political issues, which some saw as provocative but which for Faye generated ‘good’ debate. He not only welcomed critical contributions, such as the one by the entrepreneur, but intended them to emerge through his invitations to local actors. It was particularly important for Faye that youth's critical voices were addressed to local authorities, as he said in an interview:

Civil society and NGOs must put pressure on the state. We can, for example, invite state agents to the forum as we did in X. This is important. [They need to hear] what we say ‘in the street’: ‘you must revise your youth politics and the collaborations with EU states on mobility’. (Faye, NGO long-term contract, 15 March 2022)

Here, he refers to the power NGO employees like himself have in targeting specific audiences, such as state agents. By inviting them, he ensures they will be the receivers of messages condemning social injustice that counter traditional campaign messages discouraging migration. By deciding not to obstruct the debate and inviting a certain audience, Faye found fissures where he and others could challenge migration management.

Campaign activities can thus be used by both the audience and local implementers to advocate for change. Omar, a Senegalese man in his 30's with a university degree who worked as ‘migration advisor’ for the campaign Projet Migrant, but who also advised the Senegalese government, said in an interview:

Migration is a matter of social democracy. (…) It is a game of actors, and everyone has their interest. For me, it is a matter of ethics to give the floor to people; if we were not putting on pressure and trying as civil society actors to make a plea to influence social politics, it would not make sense. I feel like a middleman who channels what he has learnt from the community to influence the political process. (Omar, private company, short-term contract, 11 March 2022)

The alternative message that emerges is that grassroots knowledge should influence migration policy in a process that Omar has the power to facilitate because of his position as broker. Debates around migration campaigns among the local population become tools that campaign implementers can use to extract grassroots knowledge, channeling it towards local forms of advocacy to influence migration policy-making in Senegal. In the process, campaigns are transformed from events whose sole intention was to inform potential migrants of possible dangers into events that democratize migration debates in Senegal.

The third notable aspect of Faye's speech acts is in his disinterested collaboration with the theater company. Out of convenience and because the campaign document was vague about which theater groups to choose, he selected a theater troupe that had already developed a play on migration. He was not interested in the creation of a play exclusively for the campaign, he did not express an opinion on the script, and he did not see the play in advance. Hence, the play was not moderated in any way. However, Faye was aware that the theater company used ‘forum theatre’, a technique where the actors engage with the audience, enter into dialogue with them, and prompt them to identify with the characters and evaluate their behaviors. His lack of control over the play and the discussion the theater group facilitated, which Faye could foresee, led an alternative discourse to become prominent.

The play told the story of a Senegalese father who spent the money of his wife's tontine¹ on the boat journey for his daughter to travel to Spain, after a long discussion with his wife on who among their children should go. The parents then received a letter from their daughter informing them of the hardship she encountered in Spain and her desire to return to Senegal. The parents replied, reminding their daughter of the investment they had made in her journey, and of the promises she had made to send them goods, to pay their pilgrimage to the Mecca, and to take them to Europe. If she returned without having satisfied these requests, she would no longer be welcome in the family home.

In the forum theater, the audience was asked to evaluate the behavior of the characters. Participants in the discussion were particularly concerned with the role of the migrant daughter. What emerged was a positive assessment of her character. People saw her as moved by a desire to financially support her parents and recognized that the hierarchical family structure in Senegal did not allow her to object her parents’ decisions. In the eyes of some young people in the audience, she appeared as a victim of poverty and of irresponsible parents willing to sell family assets to fund the undocumented migration journey of their children (Tall and Tandian 2010). While the parents were blamed for chasing material wealth and social status at the expense of their children, the migrant daughter proved mindful and eager to return home instead of suffering in Europe. Through the forum theater, Senegalese youth reclaimed the space that campaigns use to deter migration and to manage the perceptions of potential migrants (Heller 2014). Young members of the audience used the theater to put forward other messages. They condemned social expectations and parental pressure that impose on Senegalese youth models of success and forms of economic responsibility. Social success is achieved with migration or when youth are able to provide for their parents. They criticize the sense of exclusion and shame they suffer when they fail to succeed. Policies to restrict mobility have made these expectations a constraint for youth rather than a support in pushing them out of vulnerability (Zingari et al. 2023). During the debate after the play youth claimed their agency to make their own decisions, whether they stay, move or return to Senegal.

Faye attended the forum theater but did not participate in the conversation. Local implementers do, however, contest campaign aims and interventions and promote their own solutions in very explicit terms.

We must rethink our intervention, as an NGO, so as to make a better societal impact. The lack of life prospects pushes people to migrate. The heavy bureaucracy makes it hard for business to flourish. There is a need for a politics to help youth. (…). Politics for circular migration is the solution. Youth will always look for other routes to go if you close the borders. We, the NGOs, we must stop this game. We must take a clearer position, because we are the ones doing things on the ground; we must advocate. (…) They will continue to fund if you, the NGO, accept the funds. (Tafa, NGO short-term contract, 21 March 2022)

Tafa's resistance to campaign interventions lies in his different interpretation of things and a sense of responsibility, as someone working for an NGO that runs migration campaigns, to reverse course by advocating for other solutions, including policies for youth employment and circular migration. But for NGOs to change course would mean campaign implementers ceasing to comply with the funding system that keeps them alive and renegotiating their role. Aware of the socio-economic context in which campaigns are implemented, Tafa does not believe in their effectiveness because he knows that migrants have agency to overcome measures of control. His contestation of campaign aims is an expression of his political agency.

Conclusion

EU-funded migration campaigns to discourage Senegalese youth from embarking on arduous journeys to Europe need local intermediaries in Senegal to facilitate the circulation of their messages. This article has examined the paradox of local staff members’ participation in the implemention of campaigns that aim to restrict the very migration they aspire to. It has explored how campaign intermediaries act as brokers through their translation of campaign official intentions into acts. We conceptualize their work as borderwork, and identify them as a new group of non-state actors borderworkers. Focusing on one particular campaign but complemented by our knowledge deriving from fieldwork with other campaigns, we have highlighted the seemingly contradictory behaviors of local campaign intermediaries and showed that their performance is enabled by their agentic work of translation.

Brokerage is embedded in the borderwork of local campaign staff. They abide by their roles in a moral migration governance by conveying campaign messages containing warnings on the risks of illegal migration and promoting sedentarism and return as desirable, implicitly calling for immobility (Fine and Walters 2022). As such, local staff contribute to campaign infrastructure and messages aimed at keeping youth in Senegal and thereby help to normalize restrictive migration policies imposed on populations in the global South. At the same time, local staff consider themselves as mere implementers and engage in opportunistic behavior. Playing the role of brokers allows them to gain economically, advance professionally, and develop personally. As translators, they are also able to help local actors such as artists who volunteer in campaigns, by meeting their requests for economic resources and for personal initiatives.

If on the one hand campaign messages have the clear goal of restraining mobility of Senegalese youth, on the other hand local implementers find fissures in their work that give space to multiple interpretations of campaign messages and make migration campaigns polysemous. These fissures are created by vague campaign instructions, the participation of many local actors in performing campaigns, and campaign projects being at odds with the realities on the ground. We showed that translation takes shape in intermediaries’ speech acts which make room for possible plural messages.

Their speech acts manifest forms of resistance. Faye, who was the focus of the vignettes, enabled forms of resistance through the choices he made along the way about how to organize and carry out the campaign forum and when to absent himself. He deliberately decided not to participate in debates, selected specific guests, and gave little thought to the play. These speech acts created room for resistance as manifested in statements by youth in the audience as well as campaign staff. These effectively transformed the intended purpose of the campaign and sent messages that contested or moved beyond awareness-raising and deterrence debates. Alternative messages focused on socioeconomic disparities, the impediments youth experience on the path to social adulthood, the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of EU-funded campaign initiatives, and the call to democratize migration issues. Borderwork performed by local campaign implementers is difficult to see. It is often hidden or composed of absences, silences or things that are let to happen. Our focus on the work that implementers do through their speech acts has unveiled the often hidden aspects of borderwork.

This study combined the notion of brokerage, and translation as inherently part of it, and the concept of ‘performative speech acts’ as developed and applied in development studies and gender studies, respectively. Bringing these concepts together helped us to understand the borderwork of local Senegalese campaign implementers. Brokers occupy a position at the interface between campaign policy makers and the 'potential migrants' that policy makers target. Their intermediation operates through their translation work. The lens of performativity showed how brokers promote campaign aims but also engage in speech acts to resist and transform campaign dominant discourses and to push alternative messages.

Our findings contribute to the emerging body of literature on migration information campaigns and borderwork by exploring how campaigns function from the perspectives of employees within implementing organizations, who have received little attention in the literature. We add this group of actors to those one might define as border workers. Sinatti (2022) argues that borderwork is ‘messy’, as it is driven by opposing forces that operate simultaneously to construct and resist borders. While she acknowledges these contrasting acts as part of the natural duality and intrinsic character of borderwork, we emphasize the agentic capacity of border workers to shape such opposing forces. Campaign implementers in Senegal perform according to contradictory interests, and their performative speech acts result in the simultaneous reproduction and transgression of borders. This happens because of their, albeit precarious positions as brokers who utilize the fissures they find in campaign instructions and implementation, to agentically use or contest campaign intentions.

In examining local implementers’ acts to reify and perpetuate the very same borders they aim to contest, we acknowlege the absurdity of the situation they are part of. Yet, their position as brokers and the local context in which they operate allow local campaign implementers to challenge relations of power of migration regimes. They contest the unidirectionality of campaign communication by channeling grassroots knowledge that campaign initiatives produce, to a different audience than envisaged by funders, namely local authorities. Yet, despite their efforts to contest the official discourse, local implementers also use campaigns as employment to deal with precarious livelihoods and in so doing propagate the ideas that campaign funders wish to spread. Whether the contestations are enough to minimize the work of propagating anti-migration narratives, leaves open the question of whether global hierarchies of migration regimes are in the end, destabilized.

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.

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).

Additional information

Funding

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

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.