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European states and international organizations employ migration information campaigns to discourage African youth from trying to get to Europe without the necessary papers. Campaigns count on a variety of actors, including local staff members of Non-Governmental Organizations in origin countries. Yet, little is known about how local campaign implementers perceive and perform their tasks. This article investigates why and how Senegalese citizens help to implement campaigns in Senegal when such campaigns try to curb the very mobility they aspire to themselves. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal, where we observed how migration campaigns were organized and run, the article shows how local implementers produce borders in their daily activities while at the same time making use of the ambiguity campaigns create. We find that local campaign staffs are brokers who simultaneously reinforce and undermine 'soft' borders in their work of translating policy into practice. We analyze how campaigns are performed through the speech acts of local staff, which define and consolidate control over the mobility of Senegalese youth. At the same time, local implementers, in their practical and discursive labor, find fissures to contest dominant discourses and push an alternative message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Senegal, migration can both be a stigma and a privilege; it can increase social standing but also lead to stigmatization and suffering following aborted migration projects. This article uses performativity as an analytical lens to explore how Senegalese male migrants narrate and perform their return to Senegal in reaction to diverse social expectations. It focuses on men who were deported from Europe or who lived there under threat of deportation before returning voluntarily. Despite appeals by migration scholars to go beyond a limited discourse of victimhood, few studies explore returnees' agency and even fewer the agency of deportees. Based on almost a year of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Senegal, we examine multiple simultaneous performances and narrations by returnee men. Despite the numerous difficulties they experience, returnees narrate success post-return by engaging with hegemonic masculine discourses of being a provider, protector and devout Muslim. But ambiguity about return is common, including silencing of suffering in public and private spaces. Performing return as an agentic act, regardless of the duration of return or whether it was voluntary, can enable returnees to conceive of belonging to Senegalese society. By recognizing returnees' agentic performativity, this article moves beyond common categorizations of deportees as victims or criminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]