Solidarity to Migrants and its Communicative Challenges: the Case of Humanitarian Corridors

The increasing relevance of emotions in political communication and in the relationship between citizens and politics have induced a renewed attention on the challenges posited by the emotional public sphere, a concept that deals with the transformation of social ties, community belonging and solidarity among social groups. Against this backdrop, a specific case is represented by humanitarian corridors. Those are mainly activated by non governmental organisations, religious entities and supra-national organisations to help migrants to come to Europe safely. The case is particularly relevant in contexts such as Italy, where those corridors have represented a form of resistence to the law and order regime promoted by the former Italian Ministry of Interior, Matteo Salvini. The paper analyses the communication strategies used by such ngos and organisations both on and offline, in order to understand if and how they have contributed to nurture an emotional approach to migrations, although radically different from the politics of hate, anger and racism that were hegemonic at the time. The research has covered six months during the summer 2019. Results show that humanitarian corridors have succeeded in creating an alternative public space from that dominated by legacy media and government's communication. At the same time, this space is more stratified than at first site, adopting multiple registers, tools and appeals. The results suggest the need to reconsider the place of emotions in the networked public spaces beyond the criticisms coming from theories on the echo-chambers and the filter bubbles. In particular, the communication of humanitarian corridors is an example of how to foster bridging social ties in an era dominated by individualism and incivility.