LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Pierluigi Musaro

July 26th, 2022

The role of extraterritorial awareness campaigns in deterring migrants from leaving their homes

0 comments | 5 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Pierluigi Musaro

July 26th, 2022

The role of extraterritorial awareness campaigns in deterring migrants from leaving their homes

0 comments | 5 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Professor Pierluigi Musarò of the University of Bologna explains the significance of awareness campaigns that target potential migrants in other countries with the goal of discouraging them from leaving their homes, and calls for more research into the role that such campaigns play in global migration.

Borders are no longer located at the margins of nation-state territories. They have become central in political debate, and more central to the experience of human beings, as a result of constant processes of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the border itself operated by different social actors through various means. The transition from the 20th to the 21st century has been marked by an increase in both the numbers of borders, and how strictly they are enforced. The securitisation of national borders contribute to a simultaneous blurring and reassertion of categories of migration, so that we can assert that the state creates illegal immigrants by making and enforcing the laws whose infraction constitutes illegality of residence. The social construction of the ‘illegal’ and the ‘securitisation of migration’ through a border control industry clearly show that borders are intentionally evoked in ways that encourage some to cross them and to restrain others from doing so.

Awareness campaigns targeting migrants, adopted since the 1990s by nation states or supra-national entities, contribute to frame migrants as security threats and the mobility from the Global South to the Global North as an emergency, and therefore subject to exceptional action, in the name of sovereignty. These campaigns, that tend to have a racist element, as well as particularly targeting women and minorities, act as symbolic bordering practices, depicting both migrants’ sending and receiving countries with the purpose of deterring the mobility of selected people.

For this reason I consider it fundamental to explore the role of these awareness campaigns within neoliberal societies, which are increasingly obsessed with the remote control of potential risks, and thus shift and securitise their borders through physical as well as symbolic tools.

Awareness campaigns are based on behaviour change theories and enact their bordering power through recurring storytelling strategies, visual politics, and social mobilisation activities implemented by governmental, inter-governmental, or non-governmental organisations. Nevertheless, despite being formally aimed at raising awareness of the threats of illegal migration, the danger of human trafficking, the challenges faced by the returnees, or the difficulties of living in destination countries, the ultimate aim of these campaigns can be understood as to contain migrant lives at the threshold between Europe (or Australia or USA) and the world of “others”’.

An overview of awareness campaigns produced and disseminated in the last decades in Europe (for example this one launched by Italy), Australia (for example the ‘No Way’ and ‘Zero Chance’ campaigns) and USA (see here for examples targeted at those in Central American countries in 2014) shows that the narratives conveyed are often stereotypical. These narratives highlight the violence and suffering of the journey, portray smugglers as villains and profit-driven criminals, and portray migrants as vulnerable and passive victims.

A screenshot from the ‘Zero Chance’ website

In their attempt to reduce emigration before would-be migrants or refugees reach the border by convincing them not to leave their home, these campaigns complement traditional methods of migration control, such as the surveillance of borders. They operate as ‘new bordering practices’ working in conjunction with extraterritorial border policies.

Nevertheless, these symbolic and imaginary dimensions of border externalisation – that is, efforts by wealthy countries to prevent migrants from reaching their borders – have received little scholarly consideration. There is now a rich literature exploring extraterritorial border management, focussing on two different aspects of this practice: the securitisation of territory adjacent to physical borders; and the disciplining of undesired migrants through the toll that deflection, detention, surveillance and deportation take on migrant bodies.

Yet, what requires greater attention is how states attempt the symbolic control of unwanted migrants. This occurs through preemptive border security, by acting extraterritorially upon people’s perceptions of migration, and depiction of irregular migration in a negative light. Beyond the physical aspect of the border, it is fundamental to consider the symbolic aspects. Images and discourses reporting the European and Australian ways of tackling the ‘migration crisis’, while illegalising those who attempt to cross the border – focussing on their endeavour in terms of risks, death, prohibitions, acts of breaking the law, failure of the arrival – are part of how the media and communications technology contribute to shaping and spectacularising the border.

The media portrayals of people crossing the border, through narratives and images of security and salvation, for example, can be understood as representational barriers, that construe their identities as ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’. This is what we can call the ‘narrated’ border, which is part of the wider ‘mediatized border’, intended as a regime of reception characterised by the fusion of caring compassion for and military protection from mobile populations.

The mediatised border can be considered as a material and symbolic device created to deter migrants and refugees, where emotions of fear and empathy co-exist through digital connectivities, ritualising our relationship with the other through discourses of difference and superiority.

To capture the symbolic role of media in managing human mobility, we need to investigate the border not as a place, rather as a process: a socially constructed and shifting structure of practices and discourses that produces norms of difference and exclusion across bodies and voices of would-be migrants, with a view to sustaining projects of geo-political sovereignty.

States use these mediated images to symbolically and morally normalise certain territorial relationships. Through these campaigns, states exercise their power to influence the behaviour of would-be migrants. In this way, this power contributes to aid the policing of migration.

Therefore, information campaigns to deter irregular migrants should be understood as new forms of delocalised migration control. These new bordering practices work to extend the subject-making power of the state beyond its sovereign borders to redefine the ‘truth’ of irregular migration. A redefinition that aims to modify the choices, desires, needs, and wants of potential irregular migrants in ways that discourage them from migrating.

Relying on methods that have less to do with law and order than with media or advertising, awareness campaigns thus appear as tools aimed at legitimising and justifying migration control and externalisation policies mostly in receiving countries. At a symbolic level, these campaigns reshape both the internal reality of sending countries (mainly by silencing their difficult conditions and reframing them as places of opportunities), the internal reality of receiving countries (as impenetrable and militarised forts), and the ‘outside’ of nation-states as buffer zones where violence, exploitation, detention, and death find their legitimacy in the interstices of (trans)national sovereignty.

Making the borders of nation-states figuratively appear, disappear, or displace at will, awareness campaigns complement physical borders. On the one side, they transmit the idea of the territoriality of space, for example showing the patrolling of receiving countries’ coasts by military boats. On the other side, they depict transnational space, such as the Mediterranean, as a ‘liquid’ zone in which they externalise responsibilities for protection obligations, except when a military-humanitarian operation can function as a spectacle for gaining consensus from the domestic electorate and neighbours in the international political arena. The media are a crucial tool in the Global North’s arsenal in determining when, where, and how a border is performed.

Awareness campaigns allow governments to be seen to be doing something to control their borders. Meanwhile, these tools clearly illustrate to what extent physical borders are complemented and legitimized by these bordering practices that are part of the complex dichotomies of care and control, the absence and presence of law, transparency and darkness, solidarity and indifference, which mark contemporary border regimes.

This article reflects the views of the author and not those of the Media@LSE blog nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About the author

Pierluigi Musaro

Pierluigi Musaro is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Business Law at the University of Bologna. He is also an Honorary Professor at Melbourne University, and a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University (USA), and at Monash University (Melbourne). He has been President of the NGO YODA (www.gruppoyoda.org) since 2008, and is Founder Director of IT.A.CÀ_migrants and travelers: Festival of Sustainable Tourism (www.festivalitaca.net) since 2009. He is the Principal Investigator of several European competitive projects on media and migration, borders and human rights, performing arts and active citizenship.

Posted In: Media representation

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *