Performing Border Externalisation: Media Deterrence Campaigns and Neoliberal Belonging

ABSTRACT

Migration deterrence campaigns are part of a set of border externalisation strategies that extend one nation’s border into other territories. Building on the literature of border externalisation, migration deterrence, and feminist media studies, we address these campaigns as critical performative strategies that enact neoliberal ideologies and depoliticise migration. We analyse three cases – two from the US and one from Europe – in which nations target would-be migrants with multimedia messaging to persuade them to stay home and become productive citizens in their countries of origin. We argue that these campaigns reify neoliberal notions of the moral, responsible citizen, and the criminal or bound-to-falter migrant. In particular, deterrence media embrace the paradoxical notion that migrants are responsible for making the right choice yet possess no agency. As our discussion demonstrates, strategies that discourage people from moving enact neoliberal ideologies that treat migration as a purely individual decision, decontextualised from issues of structural inequality.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jonathan Branfman and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Sara also thanks Luigi Achilli for his generosity. This research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Marie Skłodowska-Curie under the grant agreement No 839191 (Humanitarianism and Refugees at the Border: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations—HARBOR). We initially developed this article while Eleanor held an ACLS Fellowship at Cornell University. Any mistakes are ours.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Deterrence campaigns also circulate in South-South contexts, where Northern countries nevertheless exert control over border control strategies and migration messaging (Pécoud 2018), and where the IOM plays a significant role (see e.g. the Safe Journey campaign in Zimbabwe).

2. While outside the scope of this paper, it is important to mention that the IOM has a longer history of operating in ways that promote EU border policy, and specifically, a history of collaborating with the Italian Ministry of the Interior on border/migration projects in Libya and Niger (Brachet 2016, 276). With that in mind, although the IOM frequently posits its role as primarily humanitarian, we can recognise the organisation’s role here as supporting the EU’s (specifically Italy’s) neoliberal migration governance approach. For more extensive discussion, see Brachet (2016).