The value of promotional communication as a form of border work

By Lee Edwards | OMC 2025

Photo by Travis Saylor on Pexels

Contemporary borders are complex systems involving infrastructure, media, digital technologies, and symbolic representations. Scholars have identified the different forms of work that combine to constitute borders. This includes symbolic work that constructs certain meanings about borders; material work that generates the physical infrastructures of borders; and digital work, including the integration of technological infrastructures and surveillance mechanisms that deliver borders in digital forms. In combination, they regulate movement and shape public perceptions of migration, experiences of movement, and the realities of borders themselves. ​

Promotional communication, such as advertising, public relations, and branding, is a critical component of modern border practices, but its systemic integration into border work has not yet been fully explored. Nonetheless, it is central to how borders are constructed, maintained, and contested. This is because it connects the symbolic, material, and digital practices of border work, not only at territorial borders, but also when borders are externalised beyond state territory. Promotion’s power at borders can be understood based on the value it provides for different actors that use it, through the way these connections operate in practice. 

Promotion is targeted, persuasive communication aimed at securing support from audiences. It is used across society, and is a necessary part of competitive communication environments, where lots of different actors demand attention from audiences. In these contexts, audiences have to choose which communication, or which producer, to pay attention to. Promotional techniques help to persuade them that a particular producer’s arguments are most interesting, relevant or valid. ​

Borders constitute a classic landscape for promotional communication, because they are deeply contested spaces. Multiple actors compete to gain the attention, agreement or approval of targeted audiences, for their ideological interpretation of how and why borders should exist, operate, and be experienced. ​Scholars have identified promotional work at borders – for example, in the form of migrant deterrence campaigns conducted by individual states or the International Organization for Migration (IOM), or communicative exercises about or by migrants. However, the emphasis tends to be on representations of migrants and migration, which limits our understanding of the broader value of promotion as border work. 

Promotion offers five types of value for different border actors. ​First, its persuasive deployment facilitates debate about the nature of borders, enabling various actors – governments, NGOs, activists, and migrants – to present their positions and influence public opinion. It helps to maintain the fluidity of symbolic borders in particular, providing ongoing opportunities for all actors to challenge how they are constituted and offer new interpretations. 

Second, promotion facilitates connections between symbolic and physical borders, because it is designed with the purpose of creating changes in thinking – or rejecting change – in ways that underpin flows of capital and resources to serve different interests.  For example, when states present migration as a threat, investment in stronger security infrastructures is more easily justified. When activists and migrants challenge threat representations, they can build community support and techniques of resilience. 

Third, promotional communication supports states in their attempts to legitimise their authority over border controls. Legitimacy is necessary because citizens need to support the violence of mobility regulation that is carried out in their name, and because they need migrants to accept messages that they will be unwelcome. For example, states often use promotional techniques to frame their actions in terms of “hospitability” - protective (of citizens) or benevolent (towards migrants). This is an attempt to justify their authority as the decision maker about border operations and mobility in the eyes of their audiences, although evidence shows that such claims to legitimacy are not always successful. 

Fourth, promotion supports the commercialisation of the border as a marketplace, which benefits the many organisations that profit from border operations. These include tech firms, logistics companies, retailers, suppliers of travel documents, and “irregular” travel routes, who all market their services and products to different audiences present at borders, including states, border forces, tourists, business travellers, and migrants using irregular routes.  In the process, they instrumentalise the border in the interests of capital, and deflect attention from the violence and inequality that is inherent to border operations.​

Finally, promotion normalises the inequality that structures border operations.  Promotion is a competitive business where the production of hierarchies is inevitable – between producers and their messages, between audiences that producers care about and those they ignore, and between identities that they valorise and those they dismiss. Because promotion is so widespread, it has the effect of normalising hierarchisation, and thus facilitates the inequalities that borders also perpetuate, between racialised, classed, and otherwise hierarchically ordered groups. This plays into the interests of states, border forces, and other actors who benefit from the discrimination that borders engender.​

In delivering these different forms of value in the context of borders, promotion becomes visible not only as a mode of communication, but also as a constitutive force in shaping borders. A better understanding is needed of its role in the power dynamics and possibilities for resistance in border regimes. Three new avenues for research could be productive.

​First, research could explore the role of promotional industries at borders. I have argued that  promotion supports actors at borders, but the global promotional industries are also significant beneficiaries of border work, when they are employed by states, NGOs, border institutions, and other organisations, to communicate on their behalf. In the same way as we need to understand the operations of other border actors, we need to analyse how the promotional industries’ global networks and connections help to legitimise their practices, their messages about borders and migration, and their ongoing deployment at borders by powerful actors. 

Second, research could devote attention to the ways promotion supports the marketisation of borders. Numerous commercial actors operate at borders and have a commercial interest in their survival. Studying how they use promotion to frame borders as sites of commercial opportunity can shed more light on the commodification of mobility and the depoliticisation of border violence.​

Finally, understanding promotion as border work also offers opportunities to recognise the agency of migrants and activists as strategic communicators, rather than only victims of, or respondents to, the narratives of dominant actors. Understanding the trans-national connections that link their work would also show how they use persuasive communication to build solidarity nationally and internationally. ​

Lee Edwards

Lee is Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement at the London School of Economics. She focuses on the relationship between strategic  communications and inequalities, social justice, democracy, and media literacy. She writes extensively on topics including deliberative engagement in media policymaking, media literacy, and public relations and democracy.