Changing the story: the production of alternative narratives on migration

Civil society organisations are often confronted with the difficulty of ‘changing the story’ on migration, as the dominant narratives produced and maintained by politics as well as the media are pervaded by stereotypes and fail to give a voice to migrants themselves. Such stories about migrants are told from the position of the host country, thus reproducing established power relationships between the respective national ‘us’ and a migrant ‘them’/‘other’. This article provides empirical insights into how civil society organisations in three EU countries (Germany, Italy and Spain) have recently succeeded in producing alternative narratives that achieved a discernible impact. We discuss how such narrative success can be achieved by negotiating country-specific contexts, seising windows of opportunity, and adopting specific discursive and organisational strategies and tools from a comparative perspective.