Description
This article examines Public Information Campaigns (PICs) on irregular migration through an epistemic lens, focusing on their site of production rather than their content or reception. Drawing on eight interviews with governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors engaged in European-funded campaigns, the study reconstructs the epistemic processes through which such initiatives are conceived, negotiated and performed. It maps the constellation of actors involved, identifies the regime of truth that underpinning their content and traces the bounded negotiations shaping their implementation. The analysis demonstrates that humanitarian vocabularies of ‘protection’ and ‘awareness’ are interwoven with deterrent logics, generating selective forms of knowledge that foreground risks and adverse consequences of migration while simultaneously silencing structural drivers such as visa scarcity, systemic exclusion as well as the possibility of positive migration outcomes. These dynamics confirm that PICs function more as rationalising instruments of externalised migration governance than as sites of epistemic contestation, displacing responsibility onto migrants’ individual decision-making while depoliticising the structural constraints that shape mobility. By situating campaigns within broader traditions of governmentality and biopolitics, the article shows how they operate as epistemic technologies that not only disseminate information to the target populations, but actively produce knowledge, subjectivities and limits to the ‘thinkable’ within European (irregular) migration governance.
