Introduction

Migration is a prominent theme in global, regional and national political agendas, which, though having altering emphases, never truly falls out of fashion. The escalating situation in Afghanistan in August 2021 intensified the migration debate in Europe. While countries were evacuating people as quickly as possible before the deadline on the 31 August, the debate over who should be on the planes, what kind of risks should be taken to get them out safely, and whose fault the failure of the operation was in the first place, was getting heated. Meanwhile, in Europe, politicians, journalists, experts and citizens were regularly referring to “2015” as a “lessons learned” point in conversation.Footnote 1 This refers, clearly, to a point in time where EU borders were faced with an unprecedented number of asylum seekers, resulting in massive local and regional operations for agreeing on possible solutions. Regularly termed as a “crisis”, this experience is now being used rhetorically in various ways, depending on the argument put forth by the discussant.

The narrative in this chapter also gravitates towards the aftermath of 2015. First, it points towards initiatives to tackle migration and promote human rights, through the recognition of the importance of framing, facts, accurate information, data and communications tools in the debates. In my view, this is an indication that directly and indirectly acknowledges that states (through their governments)—as the main subjects of international law and the ones who have the responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil human rights—can be held more accountable for their actions in tackling, for instance, disinformation and radical right discourses against human rights. So far, the efforts do not seem to be indisputably successful, but on the other hand, they have not yet been fully abandoned either.

In this chapter, I do not study migration as a phenomenon, from the perspective of the EU, nor within international law (even though it is clear that these dimensions are all intertwined), but I focus on migration as a political question primarily. The main context—including the key actors—is the EU, with the main agent here being the EU agency for fundamental rights.Footnote 2 However, with this said, I will also be referring to EU policies and Commission priorities, and to some extent to individual member states. The operational environment for them is the global migration governance system, which I will be examining by referring to the drafting process and final document of the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration (2018a).Footnote 3 The GCM has already been analysed as a political document and process many times over, but I hope to add a further dimension within this chapter by treating it as an illustration of some key political tensions included in migration politics: the interplay between sovereignty and decentralised power and the efforts to tackle disinformation.

The analysis is motivated by the way the emergence of hybrid media spaces have reinforced the need to control and define agendas by means of carefully selected strategies in governance and politics. It is no longer possible to ignore the fact that contemporary channels of information are crucial sites of power struggle in the politics of migration. As such, their impact on the lives of migrants cannot be ignored, either. This development is now a common feature in the politics of global migration governance, explicitly recognising hybrid media spaces as a tool and site for politicking, politicisation and de-politicisation (for the spatial and temporal dimensions of the polit-vocabulary, see Palonen, 2003). I read the recent openings of the FRA and UN as attempts to control this space by using different approaches, specifically, by influencing politicians who have agency in global governance mechanisms and also to establish new ways for international coordination. Based on the analysis, I would argue that they are also establishing the role of narratives and conceptual inventions as part of migration governance, with the need to master the game of using multiple communication channels and sites as a crucial feature in this.

The Framework: Global Migration Governance and Migration as a Political Issue in the EU

In global migration governance, the sovereign states as subjects in international law are seen as the main agents for migration governance, but, as the use of the concept governance itself implies,Footnote 4 the everyday approach to migration at all levels leans heavily on cooperative networks, also including private and third sector organisations. To function effectively, migration governance as a system needs to accommodate activities, interests, politics and power structures at all levels, as well as between them. The global migration governance system, then, is a mix of positions where the interests of individual states, transnational civil society actors, regional governance elites and international organisations form a complex political infrastructure.

The UN’s history of dealing with displacement and migration is embedded in the aftermath of World War II and the need to respond to its consequences. Migration is a concept for describing human mobility, with its many forms and directions. The idea of “migration governance” has its roots in the aftermath of World War I, shifting in emphasis after the Cold War to being associated with the development framework, and only lately being turned towards the need for a more internationally coordinated system. Therefore, conflicts and wars have been prominent drivers behind the formation of the global migration governance system, bringing with it the idea of responsibility, human rights and (post)colonialism into the mix. This is especially true in the case of involuntary migration, but, undoubtedly, voluntary migration as a governance issue is also contained within the same system (for a discussion of the historical formation of the global migration system, and its current fragmentation, see Kainz & Betts, 2021; for a general overview of the historical phases, see Betts & Kainz, 2017).

In 2013, Crépeau’s report to the UN General Assembly stated that migration governance was becoming more and more fragmented, which, for example, made it quite difficult to put normative UN based monitoring mechanisms in place. The Global Compact for Migration is a United Nations framework document and an effort to streamline international cooperation on migration management and avoid further fragmentation. The process was led by individual states as opposed to the Global Compact on Refugees, which was directed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (McAdam, 2018). Though the driving force for this process reaches beyond the Agenda 2030 negotiations, its development is strongly tied to the language of the Sustainable Development Goals. The Agenda 2030 framework explicitly recognises the positive contribution of migrants to their new home states, and the significance of migration to countries of origin, transit and destination. Another important influence is the 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which expresses within it the freedoms of all migrants and states, and highlights the importance of migration in sustainable development globally. The integration of the International Organisation for MigrationFootnote 5 into the UN system has brought another layer of research, monitoring and policy analysis into the system. The IOM strengthens the overall framing of migration through research and information on the impact of migration in societies, framed through the neutrality of gathering information and descriptive analyses in the UN ecosystem.

The 1990s in Europe brought about the Schengen regulation, promoting free movement within the EU, as well as the establishment of European citizenship as a distinct category. Before 2010, several European states had started to regulate immigration, integration of migrants and their prospective naturalisation by setting up new administrative measures. The practice of testing immigrant’s knowledge and language skills, via varying arrangements, became a prominent practice, the most famous cases being the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria (for an recent overview of such cases, see van Oers, 2020; for an analysis of the early emergence, see van Oers et al., 2010). As such, states already had tests for language skills in place, with the United States commonly being known for its citizenship test (the US test was last revised on the initiative of President Trump, effective from 2020). The distinct feature of the European examples was, however, the way debates for the tests, their preparatory materials and courses, and even the tests themselves, employed nationalistic rhetoric and an emphasis on national distinctiveness (Björk, 2014). Researchers have shown that the seemingly reasonable and administrative procedures supported the politics of national sovereignty by the EU member states, which, through these actions, constructed demarcations between their citizens and others (Bassel et al., 2018; Kostakopoulou, 2010). The pro-testing arguments largely saw immigration as a political question for societal integration and, by doing so, highlighted the need for informing immigrants and the potential new citizens of the basic facts and cultural phenomena of the given state. The materials, and indeed the tests themselves, however, ended up constructing national narratives of how the individual states (the ruling governments at the time) regarded themselves as polities.

These practices were already established by 2015 when, gradually, EU leaders further developed European common asylum and migration policies. The arrival of unprecedented numbers of irregular migrants to EU borders in 2015 and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)Footnote 6 influenced the development of both common European migration policy and the global migration government. While these two occasions represent different cases and processes in the event-history, they are both highly important for the development of migration governance as, not only, an interplay between sovereignty and decentralised power, but also as a question of human rights. Furthermore, both turned out to be influencing factors in the development of the GCM in their own ways—the SDGs as a starting point for managing migration through data and accurate information and 2015 as a motivation for further intensification of international coordination of migration.

Nowadays, the EU has border control mechanisms, agencies and treaties for securing the rights of migrants and agreements with transit countries in place. Its member states are party to this agreement but also have their own regulations and conditions for entry in place. Politically, then, migration for the EU member states is an interplay between national and EU level regulation.Footnote 7 As the case of intensifying immigration measures by increasing administrative tests shows, the need to establish a sovereign display of immigration policy is still high on the state’s agenda, even if they facilitate international and EU level treaties on human and fundamental rights.

In the global context, which I here use in reference to the UN led multilateral governance system, migration is subjected to decentralised power, dependent on the support of sovereign states. Because of the inherent tension between the need for sovereign states to have control over their own immigration policy and the need for a decentralised governance of global migration, immigration has proven prone to politicisation in the context of multilateral governance. The centrality of sovereignty in migration politics was also an issue during the drafting of the GCM, where at the last minute, many European countries with a reputation for strict immigration regulation and radical right wing sympathetic governments, withdrew from the process. This left the document with much less support from EU member states than expected and highlighted the contested nature of migration once more. The GCM, which had not attracted extensive popular attention until the final steps, was subjected to intense politicisation activities, for instance, in Germany, Sweden and Austria (Conrad, 2021). While out of these examples, only Austria refrained from embracing the final draft, which demonstrates how mis-/disinformation campaigns managed to gain momentum from social media to the institutional level (ibid.).

The interplay between sovereignty and decentralised power links migration governance to the current discussion on the challenges to the international rule-based system. The functionality and legitimacy of the multilateral system has been discussed for some time now (if it was ever fully agreed on; but for a current review see Copelovitch et al., 2020; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Hofmann, 2020; Peters, 2011), and migration is a recurrently contested issue. The degree of national sovereignty is a prominent focal point within the multilateral system and, especially, the radical right populists have played this card intensely within the past decade. Global migration governance seems to be a point of conflict where “governance” (that is, more plural imaginations and forms of organisations) and sovereign states, which still remain subjects of international law, collide. The negotiations for the GCM, therefore, mix the idea of decentralised power and one of the most politicised issues in migration: the control over borders and the right to choose who is allowed to cross over.

Against this background, it is easy to see that there are no straightforward discussions on migration at the global level. The idea of global migration governance as a feasible way of managing migration (for a recent analysis, including an assessment of the impacts of COVID-19, see van Riemsdijk et al., 2021), even the usefulness of the concept of multilateral governance (Panizzon & van Riemsdijk, 2019), and, for example, the geopolitics affecting migration governance (Collyer, 2016) are contested and discussed by academics. The attempt to bring together UN member states to sign in the GCM also proved problematic, but with the widely signed Agenda 2030 as one of the reference points, and the difficulties of the migrant-receiving counties in controlling irregular migration and its societal and human consequences locally, efforts were made to intensify international coordination. Most notably, it showed an effort in stepping up to do something about migration at the global level. The experience from 10 to 15 years back, during the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM; 2003–2005), was that this series of regional consultations—covering an extensive list of migration-related areas, such as, circular migration, educational migrations, diaspora engagement, smuggling and trafficking—had resulted in very little impact at the policy level. The Commission’s call for greater consultation and cooperation at the regional and global level was disparagingly met with the comment “less dramatic conclusions are hard to imagine” (Aleinikoff, 2007, p. 476, cited in Betts & Kainz, 2017).

Positioning of the Approach

My inspirational lens, commonly used in different disciplines, but which in this case is oriented to political science, is one way to approach framing. I resort to the learnings and positioning of the school of thought which builds on conceptual history,Footnote 8 the history of ideas and the rhetorical perspective to conceptual change,Footnote 9 and their increasingly growing number of applications (for an overview of the development of studying political concepts and debates as an international academic field, see Ifversen, 2021).Footnote 10 In general, for this approach, concepts and debates as part of political, social and historical developments are analysed in their contexts and understood as tools and resources for political action. New meanings or concepts may have arisen as responses to change which has already occurred but which has not yet been conceptualised. It is also possible that concepts are developed or used in innovative ways to open up new spaces for politicking. This historically oriented research explores the use and meaning of political key concepts, such as democracy, citizen or crisis—such as the famous work of Koselleck and other editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG, Basic Concepts in History)—but also the wider rhetorical framework in question (especially in the Skinnerian tradition).

As opposed to some previous applications of the conceptual approach (Wiesner et al., 2018), these sources and series of events represent a case, where the power (politics) of rhetoric and how it impacts debates, political developments and even the lives of individuals, is an explicitly stated goal. The distinctiveness of the situation, highlighted in the FRA example, is due to the development of the hybrid media system and the difficulty in gaining control over its potential, often attempted by opposed actors. Embedded in the Skinnerian/Koselleckian approach for analysing politics as constituted through language, I hope to explicate, through the examples, how migration as a political question has been linked with facts and narratives within the past two decades and, more recently, clearly with the fight against disinformation.

While my position draws attention to particular concepts that are singled out from the sources, within the context of this chapter it is essential to build a conceptual map of “disinformation”. It is important to note that the aim here is not to find a perfect definition for disinformation—albeit it is true that, in the EU context, there is a definition adopted by the European Union and the FRA. However, rather, it is to apply the conceptual horizon of narrative, story, facts, data and information, while anchoring the discussion on disinformation, broadly, to the cases. The conceptual horizon is applied to explain how the claims for accurate data and information, as well as the activity for building up the infrastructure for producing it, are ongoing processes within the multilevel governance system. It also shows how the impact of (in)accurate data and information on public discourses has become an established agenda point in these processes.

Human Rights Communication and Migration Governance: Two Perspectives on Addressing Disinformation

As the framing of this analysis suggests, disinformation as a conceptual object in, and a tool for, migration governance and politics spreads out in multiple directions. The examples below include both states and the general public as audiences. Both of them become engaged in a narrative, recognising the importance of disinformation for human security, and its role in the efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of nationalist politics on diverse polities. The EU and global migration governance levels are interconnected through institutions, which are concerned with securing and promoting human rights. Simultaneously, they aim at influencing the political elites of states and governments to tackle and disengage from disinformation in their migration politics.

Disinformation in the European Landscape: Strategy and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights

The European Commission has adopted six priorities for 2019–2024, among them being A Europe fit for the digital age.Footnote 11 This priority sets out to construct a recognised and recognisable European model for dealing with, and realising the potential of, the digital transformation that is ongoing globally. This includes a positioning where the impact of emerging technologies should, for example, “encourage the development of trustworthy technologies” and “foster an open and democratic society” (European Commission, 2022).Footnote 12 The EU Digital strategy,Footnote 13 in reference to media and digital culture, also includes several EC initiatives to tackle disinformation, including the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the European Digital Media Observatory, the action plan on disinformation, the European Democracy Action Plan, the Communication on “tackling online disinformation: a European approach”, and the COVID-19 monitoring and reporting programme.Footnote 14 The first two years of implementing the EU action plan against disinformation were recently reviewed by an independent auditive group, resulting in a set of recommendations to intensify the measures to achieve greater impact (European Court of Auditors, 2021). The activities launched by the EU towards fighting disinformation are in different documents attributed to the conclusions of the European Council, where they addressed “the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns and invited the High Representative, in cooperation with Member States and EU institutions, to prepare by June an action plan on strategic communication” (European Council Conclusions, 19 and 20 June, 2015, 13).Footnote 15

Recently, disinformation has been on the active agenda of the EU Agency for fundamental rights. The Agency’s director, Michael O’Flaherty, has taken up the topic, for example, in his vlog about the urgency of the matter.Footnote 16 Tackling disinformation is one of the key topics on the Fundamental Rights Forum 2021, an international conference organised by the FRA.Footnote 17 The same topic was explored by the network of human rights communicators in June 2021, also organised by the FRA.Footnote 18 The Lisbon Treaty (2009)Footnote 19 established the role of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. As an organisation engaging in dialogue, not only with EU institutions, but also with civil society organisations, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency is “an independent centre of reference and excellence for promoting and protecting human rights in the EU”.Footnote 20 FRA was established in 2007 in the Council Regulation 168/2007 and, since then, its position has been established as an actor for reinforcing the role of human rights as part of the EU institutional framework. FRA has a list of key points in their work, with “immigration, integration of migrants, visas, border control and asylum” included.Footnote 21 Others include information society and the right to privacy and private life, and Roma integration and non-discrimination. Essentially, they collect and analyse data, inform policymakers and work with stakeholders in support of implementing the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. It also includes FRANET,Footnote 22 a network of research institutions across member states to collect and analyse information on basic rights issues from different countries.

Before addressing disinformation more regularly as a topic-level theme through different forums, the FRA has actively recognised the role of communication and media spaces in shaping narratives on human rights and migration. Especially, since 2017, FRA has put forth a series of efforts to strengthen human rights communication as part of the EU level immigration policy. Through these measures, FRA has aimed at influencing “the public” because, according to the agency, politicians and the media are responsive to public sentiment (FRA, 2017). One of the concrete outputs resulting from these measures is a report and toolkit, which discusses migration and human rights, entitled “10 keys to effectively communicating human rights” (FRA, 2018). The aim of the publication was not only to support human rights defenders and activists, but also to influence the way human rights had come to be seen as something only belonging to the few. Countering the (politically motivated) misconceptions of human rights, FRA’s approach challenges, for example, the academically established phenomenon of securitisation. This is a concept describing the act of framing something, for instance immigration, as a question of (national) security, resulting in judging migrants and migration from the perspective of national urgency and threat, while leaving other interpretations sidelined (see Gerard & Pickering, 2014).Footnote 23

The toolkit is part of FRA’s work branch support for human right systems and defenders. Contained within this, the ten principles include suggestions for communication such as “tell a human story; trigger people’s core values; and give your message an authentic voice”. Primarily directed at a specific audience of media professionals, FRA has recently (2020) published the “E-Media Toolkit on Migration—Trainer’s Manual”Footnote 24 resource online. According to FRA, this is a “web-based capacity-building platform, aimed mainly at those covering migration news to be later disseminated or published by media organisations or any other online platform as news” (FRA, 2020). As a long-term motivation, it is stated to be “the starting point of a broader project on how to cover news while maintaining respect for diversity and human rights” (ibid.). The main rationale is to shift news coverage from framing migrants and migration as a social and political problem to emphasising diversity and respect for human rights. The explicit reference point is the 2015 immigration to Europe and the examples in the toolkit cover the French and the UK examples of reporting the situation (Ibid.).

Accurate Data for a Well-Informed Public Discourse: The UN Global Compact for a Safe and Orderly Migration

In October 2020, the FRA director, Michael O’Flaherty, gave a keynote speech for the Annual Conference of the Geneva Human Rights Platform entitled “Connectivity between regional and global human rights mechanisms”.Footnote 25 The keynote was about the interconnections between the global and regional human rights systems and included suggestions for future cooperation. In his speech, O’Flaherty, for example, pointed out that the regional European system could strengthen its discursive alignment with the UN bodies by better linking the FRA’s communication and conceptualisation with the reports of the Special Rapporteur’s. Furthermore, he mentioned the toolkit for public officers at all levels of governance, composed with the FRA in the lead, which is available on their website.Footnote 26 The toolkit brings together data and information from different human rights monitoring mechanisms and has been developed in cooperation with the UN, the Council of Europe, and other EU entities. The development has also included stakeholder engagement and gathering expert insights from academics in the field. The toolkit has been launched and is now acronymed ERFISFootnote 27 (EU Fundamental rights information system). As the main group of target users are public officers, the toolkit is also stated to help the EU member states by having more informed discussions and shared understanding of human rights issues and situations globally. Working directly with states is one of the suggested future courses of action O’Flaherty points to in his speech.

While the FRA is looking to strengthen the cooperation of human rights advocates on the European and global level, the global migration governance is also currently being framed through the SDG-based Global Compacts. The Global Compact on RefugeesFootnote 28 focuses on the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, whereas the GCM covers “all aspects of migration”. There were difference in how these were developed—even though they were the result of the so-called New York Declaration (UN General Assembly, 2016)—as the GCM process was led by the states while the GCR was led by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In public discourses, the concepts regarding migration can be easily muddled, used without paying attention to accurate expression and also have different political connotations. However, the examples given here concern the implications of migration and immigration in general, without specific references to particular forms of migration or status (e.g. asylum seekers, refugees, migration, emigration and immigration).

The GCM does not explicitly use the concept of disinformation, but continues to address the role of accurate information, data and facts in migration governance, as emphasised in the SDGs. The GCM (United Nations General Assembly, 2018a, 2018b, A/RES/73/195) includes a total of 23 objectives, which deal with the variety of dimensions of migration, many of which feature and emphasise the need to generate, and utilise, accurate and sufficient data and information to steer global migration. For example, the first outlined objective is to “collect and utilise accurate and disaggregated data as a basis for evidence-based policies” (p. 7/36):

We commit to strengthen the global evidence base on international migration by improving and investing in the collection, analysis and dissemination of accurate, reliable, comparable data, disaggregated by sex, age, migration status and other characteristics relevant in national contexts, while upholding the right to privacy under international human rights law and protecting personal data. We further commit to ensure this data fosters research, guides coherent and evidence-based policy-making and well-informed public discourse, and allows for effective monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of commitments over time. (emphasis added)

Furthermore, the third objective is to “provide accurate and timely information at all stages of migration”, which refers to the state’s role as a responsible provider of information in all their activities, for instance, “for and between States, communities and migrants at all stages of migration” (p. 10). Objective seventeen, in turn, explicitly aims to “eliminate all forms of discrimination and promote evidence-based public discourse to shape perceptions of migration” (GCM, p. 25). The focus of this objective includes communities across all phases of migration processes, the political and societal elites and the media and focuses on eliminating non-discrimination practices and xenophobia, while supporting and promoting positive framing of migration and the contribution of migrants. In support of GCM’s focus on accurate data and information, migration indicators were also put in place, reported on by IOM. They are to support the data gathering and information function of GCM and contribute to strengthening channels and infrastructure for the data (IOM, 2018). The wordings and mechanisms emphasise the need for a shared understanding of the situational analysis of migration and the responsibility of states to support this proactively.

Because of the context of the formation of GCM, the need for global coordination of migration was, for the process stated, a key aim regardless of the cause of mobility. One key approach in migration debates since the signing of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 has been to claim for a holistic view on migration—including work-based mobility, as well as involuntary displacement—emphasising the neutrality of the phenomenon, as such, and respect for the human rights of all persons with migrant background regardless of their migration status, or approaches to integration. In GCM, this is, for example, expressed as a “360-degree vision on international migration” (UN General Assembly, 2018a, p. 4/36). It stresses the responsibilities of the states to offer protection to those in need and to appreciate the input of voluntary migrants to the societies.

The road towards the signing of the Compact turned out to be a dissolving one from the EU perspective. This was considered a surprise by many because of the active engagement of the EU in the process from early stages (Badell, 2020). In the case of GCM, there was hope, to some extent, that with the careful drafting of the document, the EU member states could find an agreement on migration. Yet, with the Orbán Regime in Hungary and the right wing populist regime in Austria leading the exit, this turned out to be wishful thinking. The contribution of the EU member states in the process has been covered by several researchers, who have pointed out the contested nature of migration as a political issue and the EU’s failed attempt to depoliticise it (for a recent overview, see Badell, 2020). The plausible-sounding aim of the EU to depoliticise migration governance is another way of describing work that aims at reframing and restructuring argumentation. There are 23 objectives in the document altogether, with the first three focusing on gathering information and accurate data, supporting people’s possibilities to stay in their homelands, and providing accurate and timely information at all stages of the process. This emphasises the overriding tone on management, control and functional processes. The introductory text of GCMFootnote 29 states that the document is “designed to:

  • support international cooperation on the governance of international migration;

  • provide a comprehensive menu of options for states from which they can select policy options to address some of the most pressing issues around international migration; and

  • give states the space and flexibility to pursue implementation based on their own migration realities and capacities (emphases added).

Conceptualising the GCM as “providing a menu” or “giving the states flexibility to pursue implementation” displays the political and diplomatic reality of the negotiations and the outcome. Considering the United States leads the front of non-signers by stating that the document undermines their sovereignty and was able to persuade some of the EU member states to do the same, one is left wondering what kind of result would be acceptable for these regimes if it is not the menu of flexibility in policy options. Pécoud (2021) has pointed out, however, that because of the difficulty of migration as a political issue, the document is left with internal contradictions, and indeed a depoliticised tone. It seems that this was not, after all, enough, at least not in the political climate of the time.

Conclusion: Sovereignty and Tackling Disinformation on Human Rights and Migration Agendas

After some years since 2015 or the publication of GCM, and with the current emphasis of the FRA in choice of topics for events, it is perhaps safe to say that there is an ongoing and systematic push to engage in the battle over narratives, images and framing debates on political key questions. Migration as a multidimensional phenomenon can feature as a driver, consequence, or a policy context, in relation to most ongoing global trends, such as societal impact of new technologies or the environmental crisis. Most importantly, of course, it has direct implications for the lives of many, and to political and social institutions in general. Despite the highly complex, influential and developed system of multilayered governance and the highly globalised world, sovereign states still matter in world politics. They form the core unit of international law, constitute the EU through cooperation and political processes and have considerable power over their immigration policy, with the potential successes and failures of these efforts having an impact on multilevel politics. In his opening speech in June 2021, at the annual Human Rights Communicators Network meeting, O’Flaherty discussed seven distinct points for addressing human rights. He noted that the FRA has made efforts to explicate the link between disinformation and ways to communicate better when it comes to human rights issues—a point that, he notes, originally led to the establishing of the network (point 6). He also points to the EU Digital Services Act (5) and the role of FRA itself as an agency gathering and upholding a significant database on human rights related issues.Footnote 30 In doing so, he refers explicitly to the tension between disinformation and free speech when discussing the former in the human rights context. If the joint efforts of the UN and EU level human rights actors continue to foster the discourse on data, accurate information and positive stories as building blocks for public discourses and international cooperation, it has the potential to support policies on tackling disinformation.

It is clear, however, that the strong element of sovereignty, embedded in migration as a political issue, will continue to play a role in any efforts for international migration governance. Migration remains a constantly contested issue, always there to be politicised in different contexts. Yet, addressing the different sites for framing migration and human rights, also as part of the hybrid media system, is a way of highlighting new sites and opportunities for politicising, depoliticising and framing the issue. This is an example of using the logic of politics-as-sphere type of conceptualisation, where forums and infrastructures work as spaces for politics-as-activity (e.g. agenda setting, politicking within certain limits, etc.). Using Palonen’s polit-vocabulary, it could be argued that governance could perhaps be used to limit politicking. How the hybrid communications channels fit into this thinking is an interesting thought experiment. It is also interesting to see who exactly has agency there, as “official” communication is usually reactionary and slow. The FRA examples, at least, put individuals and media professionals into focus and provide them with counter-arguments/narratives to use in everyday life.

The materials here are intended by the drafters to serve as a wide frame of reference, potentially encircling audiences and agencies across societal and political sectors. In this way, they function as something that could be communicated as shared understandings, but leave many doors open for contextually sensitive applications, for instance, further possibilities to use political rhetoric and concepts in innovative ways. It remains to be seen if these efforts have any impact on states’ rhetoric, political debates and policies in the aftermath of the recent conflicts.