By Christopher Chanco
How has Europe sought to promote anti-migration narratives in order to control the mobility of African populations? Julia Van Dessel’s doctoral thesis L’immobilisation pour horizon. Fabrique et enjeux d’un instrument européen de dissuasion migratoire en Afrique de l’Ouest : les «campagnes d’information et de sensibilisation» offers a new and insightful answer to this question. It thus joins the now considerable body of literature on migration information campaigns (MICs) and the externalisation of European migration policy[1].
Funded for well over a decade by the European Union and its Member States in migrants’ countries of origin and transit en route to Europe, MICs have been deployed on a large scale in West Africa. Through a variety of communication strategies, such as radio programmes, these campaigns seek to warn African audiences about the dangers of irregular migration and human trafficking. The aim is also to encourage ‘potential’ migrants to remain in their home countries.
Van Dessel focuses on information campaigns carried out in Niger and Senegal. These two countries were at the centre of the EU’s externalisation efforts – defined as measures to outsource border management to third countries[2]. In particular, MICs seek to engage with local media ecosystems, for example through partnerships with community radio stations, influencers, NGOs and journalists.
A growing number of studies and political observers have demonstrated the limited impact of such campaigns on migration flows to Europe and on the behaviour of migrants[3]. Despite substantial investments mobilised through aid programmes such as the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), the lack of transparency regarding their objectives and funding arrangements has also been widely criticised [4].
Van Dessel reaches a surprising conclusion: even though the evidence base for the effectiveness of migration information campaigns is rather thin, the question of their impact is beside the point.
There is a lack of clear evidence of their deterrent effect, and these ambiguities are deliberately perpetuated by donors and development cooperation actors. In this way, the campaigns can be legitimised as reliable, evidence-based policy instruments – regardless of their effectiveness or the ethical risks they entail with regard to the rights and needs of their target groups.
Strategic ambiguities and MICs as a regime of truth
Van Dessel identifies the ambiguity inherent in the campaigns’ objectives, migration narratives and communication strategies as a key feature of MICs, which explains their enduring appeal despite a lack of demonstrable impact. The narrative and strategic ambivalences of the campaigns serve to reconcile the diverse and sometimes divergent motivations of the actors involved in the design and implementation of MICs.
Van Dessel adopts a relational approach and unravels the complex ecosystem of actors involved in the design and implementation of MICs. This actor-based approach skilfully highlights the negotiations and power dynamics inherent in the network as a whole. Within this network, European and African actors jointly shape policies and programmes in line with their respective agendas and priorities. Whilst European decision-makers, for example, strive to demonstrate to their constituents that they are doing ‘something’ to tackle irregular migration, their African counterparts – including local journalists and civil society organisations – may combine professional interests, political convictions and strategies to negotiate economic capital with donors. Finally, for UN actors such as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)[5], the humanitarian dimension of MICs also serves to reconcile their underlying objective of deterrence with their institutional mandate to defend the right to migration.
Van Dessel points out that the humanitarian rationale behind MICs obscures this core objective of deterrence. In fact, almost all actors involved in implementing MICs tend to deny or downplay this implicit objective from the outset:
“Virtually all began by stating that the aim of their campaigns was not to ‘deter migration’, but rather to inform or raise awareness amongst (potential) migrants (regarding the dangers of irregular migration)”[6].
This depoliticised portrayal of MICs as neutral awareness-raising measures helps to construct an apparent consensus amongst actors who rally around a shared humanitarian ‘truth’; one that purports to act in the interests of the African population when it asserts that non-mobility is preferable to the risks and dangers of migration.
Van Dessel’s thesis draws inspiration from critical social anthropologists such as Olivier de Sardan (2021). They highlight how, through the interplay between actors along the entire value chain, aid programmes develop that are forced to adapt to the inevitable contradictions between their original assumptions and local realities [7]. Far from being neutral, these programmes reshape or reinforce certain values and norms, beyond their explicitly stated objectives.
The MICs have reshaped normative assumptions about human mobility and promoted values that portray non-mobility as the norm. At the same time, they seek to influence the potential of African migrants in a way that aligns with European priorities. They reinforce the hierarchy of transnational mobility, in which remaining in one’s country of origin is presented to non-Western population groups as a rational and morally superior decision.
Using critical discourse analysis, Van Dessel traces the developments in the narratives promoted by MICs over the last decade. The first generation of MICs (2000s–mid-2010s) relied heavily on fear-based messages and emphasised the dangers of irregular migration, such as drowning, enslavement or deportation. This approach mirrored campaigns against human trafficking and portrayed mobility as inherently dangerous and migration as a threat to be prevented. Van Dessel argues that, from 2015 onwards, the MICs shifted towards a more ‘positive message’[8], aimed at convincing potential migrants of the benefits of remaining in their own countries. They framed this as a matter of ‘local self-empowerment’, with particular emphasis on economic opportunities. The organisers of the MICs also describe their measures as a way of promoting ‘dialogue’ with local communities, or as neutral awareness-raising, rather than as the imposition of external narratives[9]. By focusing on individual decisions and awareness-raising, however, MICs nevertheless obscure their underlying deterrence objectives.
These narrative shifts, Van Dessel argues, demonstrate the flexibility of MICs and the fact that those in charge are sensitive to how their messages are perceived by the local population; they do not, however, call their general premises into question. In this context, it is somewhat regrettable that Van Dessel does not draw more explicitly on the rich literature on critical geography[10] or on works concerning propaganda and the mechanisms of transnational influence[11], as she acknowledges towards the end of her dissertation [12]. In their attempts to influence or restrict the spatial imaginaries of African target groups, MICs are clearly an instrument of transnational influence that reinforces a regime of truth centred on the notion that African populations are best served by ‘staying at home’.
Legitimacy through obfuscation and the creation of expertise
Van Dessel demonstrates that funders and programme managers are well aware that their messages suffer from mistrust and a lack of credibility in the eyes of their target audiences: the latter might perceive them as paternalistic or ignorant of local realities, which in turn partly explains their ineffectiveness. This moral unease is reflected in recent research, such as that by Schenetti et al. (2025), which examines in depth the conflicting motivations and ethical dilemmas faced by EU policymakers regarding the actual objectives of MICs[13]. It is also reflected in the fact that European aid organisations are increasingly attempting to conceal their involvement in MICs through a strategy of unbranding[14].
To avoid being perceived as external or Western impositions – which could undermine the credibility of the narratives promoted by MICs – various strategies have been employed to restore trust in the campaigns. These include removing donor logos from communication materials related to MICs or collaborating with local intermediaries, such as African journalists and NGOs.
Van Dessel’s study sheds particularly illuminating light on the role of private actors such as Seefar, a company specialising, amongst other things, in behaviour change strategies[15], international consultants, PR agencies and large NGOs. For her, European donors’ interest in MICs goes hand in hand with certain financial benefits. An entire industry of expertise has developed around MICs – and EU migration policy in general – which serves to depoliticise their objectives and obscure the power dynamics and diverging interests behind their implementation. Van Dessel highlights the extent to which consultancy firms such as Seefar have played a central role in the design and impact assessment of MICs. To measure their influence on target groups, they increasingly propose complex, highly quantitative and data-driven approaches. The same network of private actors is thus involved both in carrying out interventions and in determining the methods used to measure their own ‘impact’. The opacity of their influence on EU-funded aid programmes, she argues, has served to perpetuate a cycle of political justification without evidence.
The study confirms arguments from the critical literature on impact measurement. According to this literature, monitoring and evaluation activities are less designed to measure actual outcomes in the interests of learning or political transformation, but rather fulfil a symbolic and bureaucratic function [16].
The use of external experts serves to legitimise aid measures as ‘evidence-based’ and thus to justify their continued funding, even though their effectiveness cannot be proven. This applies in particular to programmes supporting the media that aim to bring about behavioural change; the impact of such projects on the target groups is, by its very nature, difficult to measure[17]. These dynamics raise serious concerns regarding the transparency of European aid policy[18]. The survival of organisations, electoral tactics or institutional privileges appear to take precedence here over concrete results, not to mention their disconnect from the needs and expectations of the local population.
Even in the case of middle-income countries, the question of effectiveness is of secondary importance. The involvement of large international NGOs and external consultants in these countries bolsters their professional standing and influence, whilst at the same time securing strategic access to EU funds in the now-flourishing market for migration management and border control[19]. Although the study does not draw directly on it, it does refer to relevant literature in the political sociology of media development, which highlights the role of such medium-sized resource brokers as intermediaries between donors, local implementing organisations and the target groups of media support measures[20].
Such intermediaries play a crucial role in securing access to funding and in helping local actors, to whom the implementation of measures is subcontracted, to gain legitimacy and symbolic capital. They also enjoy a certain degree of autonomy and can – as in the case of Seefar – radically reshape the design and implementation of measures.
Local channels and media intermediaries
Van Dessel’s most interesting observation concerns the way in which the IOM and MIC implementing organisations recruit local actors to convey their messages: these include journalists[21], community leaders, artists and ‘returnees’[22] – people who have voluntarily settled in Senegal and Niger following failed attempts to migrate to Europe[23].
According to Van Dessel, the narratives disseminated by local interlocutors tend to moralise or depoliticise the reasons for emigration and shift the responsibility onto individuals and their decisions.
Returnees, in particular, were encouraged to highlight the difficulties they encountered in Europe or North Africa as a moral lesson about the risks and dangers of irregular migration. Some campaigns even partnered with local musicians to produce songs emphasising the decision not to emigrate as a patriotic duty (“Stay at home, build your future here”).
Finally, Van Dessel highlights the controversial practice of paying Senegalese and Nigerian journalists to report on MIC campaigns. It is important to note that the campaigns do not directly aim to turn journalists and artists into local mouthpieces. Nevertheless, this practice has raised obvious concerns on the part of the funders themselves regarding the indirect influence of the media strategies employed by MIC implementers on local editorial coverage[24].
Furthermore, the implementation of information campaigns is often delegated to or subcontracted to Senegalese and Nigerian NGOs and their local staff, even though they are designed, funded and coordinated remotely by Western actors[25].
Aware of their own limited understanding of the contextual realities, international NGOs and the IOM turn to these grassroots actors, who are perceived as more credible interlocutors by Senegalese and Nigerian target groups.
Out of concern that their involvement might appear too visible, Western aid intermediaries prefer to work behind the scenes, even though Seefar and international PR firms played a key role in developing these ‘grassroots’ persuasion strategies[26]. The shift in the implementation of MICs is intended to ensure that the narratives promoted by MICs are acceptable to African target groups.
Van Dessel argues that local actors have a strong tendency to reproduce the institutional discourses of their European counterparts or of UN agencies. Today, “they play their own part in the spectacle of the border”: in doing so, they reinforce the prevailing portrayals of human mobility as a risk to be avoided and a problem to be managed, rather than as a legitimate pursuit of a better life elsewhere and a right to be defended.
For Van Dessel, the deterrence narratives promoted by MICs “contribute to entrenching unequal access to the right to transnational mobility”[27]. She identifies a number of exceptional cases in which Senegalese civil society actors have attempted to circumvent the dominant narratives favoured by MICs, whilst advocating for safe migration routes or highlighting how restrictive visa policies perpetuate irregular migration. However, even when staff at local NGOs resist or reinterpret these deterrence messages, their structural dependence on external funding, as well as the need to secure social capital through interactions with European actors[28], limits their relative autonomy.
The result is that deterrence narratives remain a dominant feature of information campaigns and, conversely, are internalised by local elites – including academics, journalists and cultural figures.
Interestingly, according to Van Dessel, these local advocates have themselves never experienced transnational mobility or attempted to emigrate, even though they seek to dissuade their fellow citizens from emigrating. Overall, her hypothesis regarding local conformism towards the narratives disseminated by MICs could have been further substantiated. The study’s findings reflect Lugo-Ocando’s (2020) insights into how aid programmes secure the consent of the local population by operating through local intermediaries, including civil society organisations and media professionals[29]. As inherently political instruments, aid measures aim to transmit certain normative assumptions and ideological visions to foreign populations; in the case of MICs, these apparently concern universal values and norms relating to border regimes and human mobility.
The involvement of West African journalists and the (indirect) impact of MICs on the dissemination of migration narratives within local media ecosystems certainly merit further research. To what extent have MICs led to the normalisation of deterrence narratives in local news cycles and editorial agendas?
Of course, as Mangon (2023) [30] points out, local journalists cannot be reduced to mere passive recipients of external norms and frameworks; they appropriate these in order to adapt them to their professional goals and local realities. Nevertheless, for fear of losing access to European actors or funding, African journalists may still avoid stories that openly challenge deterrence narratives. These include, for example, successful migration experiences in Europe or critical, human rights-based perspectives on the EU’s externalisation policies and agreements with national governments. As a result, unconscious biases may persist in reporting.
Furthermore, despite her sensitivity to local scope for action and the power imbalances underlying the implementation of MICs, Van Dessel could also be accused of Eurocentric bias. Whilst the perspectives of European donors and development aid actors were analysed thoroughly, their African counterparts received less attention. The study mentions only in passing the lukewarm reception of MICs by Senegalese and Nigerian state authorities[31]. Indeed, Van Dessel acknowledges that her transnational, comparative approach was not suited to shedding further light on African perspectives on MICs. This was partly due to linguistic and time constraints, which prevented a more detailed or ethnographic analysis of programme implementation with regard to her Senegalese and Nigerian interviewees[32].
In a sense, this was inevitable; it confirms the gatekeeping role played by the European NGOs involved in the implementation of MICs. As a Belgian researcher, she conducted most of her interviews with high-level representatives of the European programme management, as opposed to her African interlocutors.[33]
Euro-African migration diplomacy and anti-migration propaganda
Van Dessel concludes that three mutually reinforcing logics explain the policy of non-mobility underpinning the MICs[34]: the concealment of deterrence objectives, the desire to control the aspirations of potential African migrants, and the monopoly on claims to truth regarding human mobility. She identifies a shift in the focus of European migration policy. What was once a strategy to prevent irregular migration on ostensibly humanitarian grounds has become a clear strategy of sedentarisation, that is, of making people settle down.
Irregular migration is reduced to a problem of misinformation, and immobility is reinterpreted as local empowerment rather than a restriction. A hierarchical view of human mobility is normalised, in which some population groups are freer to cross borders than others.
In other words: the aim is to ensure that Africans remain in Africa. Van Dessel even goes so far as to describe MICs as ‘anti-migration propaganda’. Her research makes it difficult to dispute her conclusion. The study offers important insights into the paradoxes that continue to (over)determine Europe’s relations with the ‘Global South’[35]. MICs are a truly ‘Euro-African’ policy instrument. As Van Dessel clearly demonstrates, deterrence efforts are not simply a top-down measure, but are repurposed by local African elites and intermediaries in a mutually reinforcing dynamic[36]. They are therefore the result of ongoing negotiations between European and African political elites[37] and shed light on the dissemination of their respective ideological assumptions, values and discourses surrounding human mobility[38]. They are also characteristic of the contradictory, at times paternalistic and undoubtedly schizophrenic impulses that underpin Europe’s post-colonial relations with the African continent[39].
Even though the humanitarian ambivalences of EU-funded MICs stand in contrast to the overt, discursive violence of Australian or American information campaigns, they nevertheless bring to mind the darkest episodes of colonial history. This is also evident in the involvement of returnees – sometimes forcibly deported – as local mouthpieces for anti-migration narratives.
Van Dessel’s arguments could, however, be taken even further. The world appears to be moving towards a post-liberal consensus in which freedom of movement – principles that once lay at the heart of the European project – are increasingly being controlled at every turn, even within Europe itself[40]. Recent changes in EU migration policy confirm such trends[41]; for instance, Member States have recently been permitted to facilitate deportations to ‘cooperative’ African states[42], continuing the Anglo-Saxon model of ‘safe third countries’[43]. At the same time as the emergence of domestic nationalist tendencies amongst traditional European donors to middle-income countries[44], aid budgets are shrinking, whilst programme planning is now explicitly linked to efforts to restrict the right to transnational mobility – which runs counter to the principles of development cooperation effectiveness and the liberal values that European actors once purportedly promoted through their policies[45].
Further research would certainly be required to understand this strategic reorientation in Europe’s migration and development aid diplomacy. What developments in European development aid and migration policy might we expect in the future, given this illiberal zeitgeist[46]
? Secondly, Van Dessel’s reflections are particularly relevant at a time of growing competition with non-European actors who are attempting to intervene in African information ecosystems with their own journalistic models and standards[47]. These are rarely compatible with a genuine defence of migrants’ rights, freedom of expression or international humanitarian principles. Furthermore, Senegal and Niger – the two countries at the centre of his research – now offer insights into the paradoxes of the externalisation of European migration policy. In Niger, the military coup in 2023 led to a breakdown in migration cooperation with the EU [48]. In contrast, in Senegal[49], the sovereignist and anti-Western rhetoric of the national elites has not resulted in a clear break with the EU. On the contrary, as in the cases of Tunisia and Libya[50], cooperation with Europe on border control continues despite diplomatic tensions.
Finally, the globalisation of exclusionary ethno-nationalism and anti-migration sentiment highlights the mirror effects between the global North and South. The right to transnational mobility – and the international humanitarian standards underpinning it – is increasingly being called into question, whilst defenders of migrants’ rights are being punished more frequently in both Europe [51] and Africa [52].
This article, “Information campaigns on migration: The regulation of mobility in West Africa” , was originally published by the European Journalism Observatory on 21 May 2026.