Migration Policy Centre - MPC

The political discourse about migration has changed significantly in the past few years. The European Agenda on Migration underlines how “Misguided and stereotyped narratives tend to […] overlook the inherent complexity of this phenomenon, which impacts society in many different ways.” Already before the so-called “migration crisis” in 2016, the representation of migration as a threat to security had increasingly monopolized the public debate at global level. The consequences are borne particularly at the level of policymaking: the growing negative attitude towards migrants has made migration management approaches that could better harness the positive contribution of migrants more difficult to implement. The socioeconomic inclusion of migrants is being challenged by increasingly hostile attitudes. Contextually, legal migration channels have progressively shrank, with evident repercussions on economies of both countries of origin, due to decreased remittances, and countries of destination –facing labour shortages, growth of the informal economy, as well as migrants’ exploitation. Aware of the divisive potential of an unbalanced public discourse on migration, the E-MINDFUL project offers the opportunity to leverage the role and respective mandates of the OSCE, a regional security organization with a multi-dimensional mandate on migration, and the ILO, a specialized UN agency, custodian of the key international conventions on labour migration, in the framework of the EU Agenda on Migration. The aim is to provide the European Commission, the OSCE and the ILO constituents with a solid action-oriented knowledge-base and guidelines as well as relevant, innovative instruments that can orient future communications’ efforts on the matter. The project will work in collaboration with communication experts in Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia, including university faculties of semiotics, art, communication and digital marketing, schools of journalism/TV/radio and other media. Through this participatory process lessons learned from selected awareness-raising endeavorswill inform the development of new approaches and innovative communication models and edutainment formats. In doing so, the project will set the basis for an inclusive methodology and co-creation processes able to expand the outreach of audiences and the effectiveness of the messages. This overall process of stocktaking and prototyping will be capitalized in the possible piloting ofweb series and in a toolkit, comprising a publication and a set of distilled key findings and guidelines, which will provide a relevant compass and crucial instruments to steer and assess future communication strategies on migration and migrants.

The project is conducted in collaboration with OSCE – Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, ILO – International Labour Organization European Commission DG Home

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) under project number. AMIF-2019-AG-IBA-OSCE

MPC researcher associated with this project:
Lenka Dražanová, James Dennison, Andrew Geddes, Nikolaj Broberg