Humanitarian persuasion against xenophobia: Venezuelan migrants in Colombia

The increasing migration of Venezuelans into Colombia has brought new challenges for local and international humanitarian agencies which seek to promote peace and respect for human rights. The migrants are vulnerable to xenophobia and discrimination and the humanitarian agencies feel more committed than ever to confront this phenomenon. Since the humanitarian response is nowadays based on communication, participation and feed-back, this project aims to address the issue at hand from a persuasive communication perspective. To this aim, we approach the topic in the context of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which has been actively giving humanitarian assistance to Venezuelan migrants. In particular, this study attempts to discover how the ICRC can communicate persuasively its humanitarian messages through social networking sites to prevent xenophobic behaviors and sentiments against the Venezuelan migrants. This research will also enrich the literature on persuasion studies and will bring new theoretical and empirical contributions by focusing specifically on humanitarian persuasion.