Threatening – The Refugee as a Threat

Abstract

Contemporary media and public accounts have increasingly framed the refugee ‘crisis’ in terms of security, with refugees considered as masses to be managed and controlled, migrants pointed at with generic allegation of terrorist threat, and state borders closed and militarized. Securitization of migration may not be a new phenomenon (Saunders 2014) but it is one that has recently received a great deal of attention (see among others Bigo 2002; Pugh 2004; Huysmans and Squire 2009; Huysmans 2000; Musarò 2017; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Watson 2009). What all these scholars have in common is that they highlight different ways through which refugees are represented, described, and thought of as threat. Media and public accounts have consistently represented refugees through words such as plight, invasion, flood, hordes, or waves (Friese 2017). The “highly heterogeneous and (too) strongly mediation-dependent European politics created an array of – in most cases negative – interpretations of the Refugee Crisis” (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018). In line with this narrative, at the visual level, the images that have accompanied the news on refugees have mostly included overcrowded boats, long lines of people in need, and looming masses of people crammed at border fences.