Understanding Public Relations as a Bordering Practice at the Nexus of Borders and Migration

Scholars have incorporated the importance of communication in bordering practices, in analyses of border complexity, aesthetics, multiscalarity, and relationships between state, capital and mobility. In this article, I apply insights from critical socio-cultural public relations and bordering scholarship to the case of borders and migration, to argue that public relations, as a specific form of persuasive communication, plays a vital role in bordering practices. It provides resources to communicate representations of borders and migration, interacts with other border practices, and enables borders to move across time and space. As a political intervention, its persuasive characteristics of masking, managing visibility and circulation, and producing inequality reinforce the relationship between state, capital and mobility, but also perpetuate the contested nature of bordering, as each intervention shifts the landscape for future communication. I argue that future research should take account of the political economy of the global public relations industry as a border actor, and of the systematic and globalized use of public relations techniques by migrants and their allies, to further enhance our understanding of bordering practices at the nexus of borders and migration.