Affective Borderwork: Governance of Unwanted Migration to Europe Through Emotions

ABSTRACT

This article explores how contemporary European migration governance utilizes affect and emotions to govern (unwanted) migration. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, we aim to show how emotions are used to bring the border alive beyond the actual geographical border, both inside Europe and in countries of origin. By juxtaposing two cases we highlight the interlinkages but also the differences between an, IOM-led, information campaign targeting the emotional register of the local population in rural Senegal, and a series of motivational interviews conducted by the Danish police targeting rejected asylum seekers refusing to return to their country-of-origin. We demonstrate how particular emotions are harnessed in these interventions to evoke morally charged spatial geographies that normalize racialized global inequalities to impact the (im)mobility of unwanted migrant subjects. Additionally, we seek to disentangle the ambivalent encounters between the interventions and the people they target. We analytically bridge cases that are often dealt with as separate phenomena in the academic literature, to tell a more nuanced story of how contemporary affective borderwork shapes European border externalization and internalization practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective borderwork
• migration governance
• information campaigns
• motivational interviews
• return

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the research participants, and the research assistants Mathias Bassane and Thierno Guye who played a crucial role for the data collection in the Senegal. The authors wish to thank Anissa Maâ, Julia Van Dessel, Amandine Van Neste-Gottignies and Pierluigi Musarò for their useful comments during the workshop: What do we say to migrants throughout their journey?

Disclosure Statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Rodriguez 2019 and Heidbrink 2020 are exceptions.

2 Both studies received ethical approval from relevant institutions and all research participants have given informed consent.

3 The research assistants Mathias Bassane and Thierno Guye played a crucial role in the data collection.

4 So called return migrants have come to play an important role in IOMs ‘peer to peer’ communication efforts. Some have been deported back from Europe, others returned through the “Assisted Voluntary Returns and Reintegration” programmes (AVRR programmes) funded by the EU, while others have returned on their own. Such ‘indigenous intermediaries’ that with in recent years have experienced difficulties and violence en route are upon return to Senegal recruited to share their stories, as they are considered more trustworthy messengers than states and international organizations (see Má, van Dressel and Vammen this issue).

5 The task was moved from the police to a newly funded Return Agency under the Ministry of Immigrants and Integration in 2020.

6 Section 40 of the Danish Aliens Act (the duty of aliens to give the requisite information for departure, to assist in procuring travel documents, etc.)

7 A recent study from the Danish Institute for Suicide Prevention demonstrated that asylum seekers in Denmark had an eightfold higher rate of suicide attempts than the general population (Khan Amiri et al. 2021). In 2021, a rejected asylum seeker who was an interlocutor of Kohl's coworker on the project, committed suicide after being returned to Denmark by another Dublin state. This paper is dedicated to him.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond: [Grant Number 8018-00127B and 7013-00092B].