‘When Migrants Become Messengers’: Affective Borderwork and Aspiration Management in Senegal

European-funded information and awareness-raising campaigns aimed at fighting migrant smuggling and discouraging African youth from migrating have become increasingly important aspects of European borderwork. To grasp the effects of such borderwork in Africa, this article pays attention to how affect and emotions are used in migration awareness campaigns and how local communities respond. An ethnographic exploration of one recent campaign in Senegal offers insight into a particular, European-driven form of affective borderwork. Such ‘aspiration management’ (Carling and Collins 2018) works to instil a sense in would-be Senegalese migrants that their hopes of migration to Europe are both dangerous and futile. I argue that affective borderwork works at a different level than other border activities connected to legal and physical migration control. By cultivating particular emotions and morally-embedded geographies, these campaigns promote an inner, self-regulating border in the minds and bodies of people. In these campaigns, which are crafted at the intersection of humanitarian principles of care and border control efforts, return migrants become key messengers.