Rebranding migration and framing new beginnings to stop unwanted migration in Senegal

In their effort to stop unwanted migration, the European Union and its member states have for more than a decade invested in information and awareness campaigns in West Africa. To manage people’s aspirations and deter them from going to Europe such interventions have mainly focused on the dark side of contemporary irregular migration - the violence, risks and potential loss of life and continue to do so. In other words, information campaigns portray migration not as potential new beginnings but as a path to failure and suffering. Yet, some of the recent campaigns and initiatives in Senegal funded by European governments and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa place less emphasis on the negative aspects of irregular migration. Instead, they try to convince people to stay at home by portraying Senegal as an emerging arena for individual socio-economic development. Building on fieldwork in Senegal, this paper offers an ethnographic exploration of this recent ‘positive turn’ in European aspiration governance. How and to what extent do these positive rebranding interventions differ from more traditional information campaigns? And how do they try to contain a historically mobile population and situate their desire of a better life within Senegalese society? By examining these questions, I aim to give a sense of the friction that evolves locally when European-driven affective borderwork circulate positive and negative emotions to perform the border, govern mobility and carve out new subjectivities (Vammen 2021, Landau 2019).