Affective Borderwork: Governance of Unwanted Migration to Europe Through Emotions

Abstract

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.