This conceptual article examines the organizational crisis in England’s National Health Service in light of the recently launched model of policing called Right Care Right Person introduced to reduce police hours spent dealing with mental health crises. It is a move that has come with concerns for health services because these newly created gaps alongside the existing ones pose challenges around funding and timescales in implementing the new model. It is a curious case of organisational paradox that diverting mentally ill persons into health services and ‘decriminalising’ those whose health conditions bring them to the attention of the justice system, has raised concerns in the health sector about access to adequate mental health services unless an arm of the justice system is involved. Given the similarities in health and legal systems in the Anglo-Western world, this English model has international implications about organisational paradoxes in health systems.

Who should look after those with mental illness? An organisational paradox.

The human mind can sustain conflicting thoughts or beliefs about itself and cope with the ensuing cognitive dissonance via a psychological defence mechanism known as compartmentalisation. Using the current Anglo-European response to the war in Ukraine versus Gaza, this article proposes that beyond the individual, it is possible to conceive of collective or national compartmentalisation. This can offer a useful model in understanding radically different responses to different social categories of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war. It will argue that integration of all aspects of self-conception at the collective and national level is, as it is for the individual, a more desirable outcome in matters of humanitarian response and collective moral integrity.

Collective Compartmentalisation and International Affairs 

ConclusionThis article draws from Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine dominant discourses during the Russian and Ukraine war and the ensuing refugee crises. It utilised a simplified guide of the method by focusing on the hermeneutic substance of overlapping steps in Willig’s 6 step model which was itself developed from Parker’s (1992) 20 step model. &nbsp;The emerging discourses from mainstream news channels or the print press from different political leanings demonstrate an admission of preferring Ukrainian refugees over Syrians based on the aesthetic quality and value, cultural proximity, citizenship, and European familial identity of Ukrainians, making one’s geographical and cultural point of origin a key aspect of group identification in matters of humanitarian responses. The authors of these discourses were political actors or members of mainstream media engaging in what appeared to be recognizable and common-sense dominant discourses raising questions about a novel aspect of humanitarian communication that is concerned with the aesthetic and socioeconomic quality of sufferers not to mobilize action but to affirm it. It is a form of communication that aligns with the biopolitical governmentality of refugees beyond simplistic and traditional conceptions of race and identity because it offers material, aesthetic, and moral gains.

Biopolitical governmentality through humanitarian communication of the aesthetic 

Biopolitical governmentality through humanitarian communication of the aestheticIn the third video (Appendix A), a reporter posed the following question: “why just Ukraine, why not other countries” before concluding “some lives are more valuable than others”. The shortlisted 3 videos were critiquing Western duplicity in handling humanitarian crises based on identity rather than the human rights principles that liberal democracies espouse to hold; that these comments embody European racism against non-European populations. The examined discourses reveal how duplicity and hypocrisy – the capacity for compassion toward “familial” refugees and indifference toward “foreign” refugees – is not only possible but understandable when examined within biopolitical governmentality of (a) biosocial self-preservation “against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage” (Foucault, 2003) and (b) moral self-promotion in matters of humanitarian responses (c) facilitated by the humanitarian communication of the aesthetically and culturally familiar European refuge that relied on language and imagery to construct discourses of legitimate vulnerability for collective action.Biosocial self-preservationDiscourses about fellow Christian and European citizenship as necessary elements of differential (and better) treatment cannot be understood within simplistic notions of irrational prejudice or racism alone. Rather than primarily “an irrational prejudice, a form of socio-political discrimination, or an ideological motive in a political doctrine” biopolitics (and its intersection with race and religion here) is a government technique of population management (Su Rasmussen, 2011). This is achieved by distinguishing – dominant discourses only playing a part – between familial and foreign depending on their biological contributions to the conditions of the host population; that is, based on possessing certain traits, “something that will make life in general healthier” (Foucault, 2003). What counts as contribution can however shift depending on current biopolitical circumstances if, for example, deemed enhancing to the material conditions of the host population, meaning that it is a biopolitics that may be influenced by traditional racism but it is able to move beyond it (Doti, 2011). That is, Syrians themselves were initially considered “good” and legitimate refugees, the “ideal refugees” worthy of fast-tracked processes compared to the “second-tier” Iraqis and Afghanis because their vulnerability was visible (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016) before now acquiring a new status of foreign and uncivilised compared to Ukrainians. But before these changes, non-Syrians used to perform a Syrian “persona” in the hope of expediting their protection because of the previous prioritization of Syrians by the international community (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016), revealing the malleable nature of biopolitics beyond a simplistic adherence to race and identity.The examined discourses do reveal a unique element of this particular biopolitical governmentality: it is not solely based on economic and material contributions or the usual (and perhaps expected) aspects of nationality, ethnicity, colour, and religious traits of in-group identifications, but also on the aesthetic quality and value of the familial refugees. That Ukrainians were easier to accept because they were blonde, blue eyed, intelligent, well dressed, and civilised fellow Europeans reveals the literally biological and genetic “bio” in biopolitics. Taken in context and in light of the rising concerns about the “Islamisation” of Europe (Kauffman, 2017; Tibi, 2010; Sasnal and El Menouar, 2020), failures of multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley, 2012; Mikelatou and Arvanitis, 2019), and the more recent global conversations about the persistent racial tensions between Europeans and non-European Global South, aesthetic/biological and sociocultural/European self-preservation become essential aspects of population management beyond the mere life, longevity and general health aims of biopolitics. In addition to the emotional benefit to the host population, linguistic devices such as middle-class, educated, well-dressed, and civilised suggest that Ukrainians also bring material and cultural benefit. Indeed, biopower is an instrument of neoliberal capitalism that provides the controlled supply of bodies and population management (Foucault, 1978, p. 141) to enhance to productivity of the host population in material, cultural, and aesthetic/biological gains.Moral self-promotionThe motivations behind the biopolitics of aesthetics and cultural European self-preservation then raise questions about a core aim of the Ukrainian humanitarian response. If humanitarian government or, according to Fassin (2007) intervention, is the politics of life that prioritizes which lives are legitimate or worthy of saving, then the main aim of humanitarian government is not the need of the refugees but the “care and well-being of host populations” especially when the malleability of biopolitical racism can shift if those previously deemed “inferior” or “unworthy” become instrumental in the material or emotional gains of the host population (Mavelli, 2017). Thus, Ukrainians, once the Eastern Europeans the West has long regarded as primitive and “Asiatic” Slavs who are “born slaves” and a “colonial people” with “instinctive hostility to civilisation” (Malik, 2022) are now fellow Europeans who deserve solidarity as part of a unitary Judeo-Christian European family. This is not necessarily and solely because of the “value” of Ukrainians in themselves but because humanitarian governmentality provides the host nations what Mavelli (2017) calls “a way of promoting a self-understanding” as moral and compassionate in order to biopolitically enhance the emotional life of the host population.Biopolitical governmentality of Europeans through humanitarian governmentality of Ukrainians then becomes particularly necessary in light of persistent accusations of European racism toward Syrian and other non-European refugees, enabling Europeans to bypass the obstacles posed by humanitarian principles and providing moral exculpation; indeed, many of the reporters were making their case about why this refugee crisis is fundamentally different than the 2015 without much prompting. And what of any guilt that may counter the aims of enhancing the emotional life of the host population when the subjective experiences of Syrians is consequential, including deaths at sea? Mavelli (2017) suggests the creation of a “perpetrator” identity in the refugees themselves protects the aims of the emotional well-being that comes from assisting Ukrainians. That is, because Syrians are fleeing civil war, their identity and culpability can be framed as uncertain in a self-inflicted internal war without clear victims and villains. Finally, the geopolitical calculus of helping Ukrainians to prevent an eventual Russian move to the West or all out invasion also highlights the nature of biopolitical and humanitarian governmentality beyond traditional explanation of race to instead reflect material and moral strategizing. In essence, the biopolitical governmentality of Europeans through humanitarian governmentality of Ukrainians enhances both the material, emotional, and moral life of host populations.Humanitarian communicationIn line with Chouliaraki’s findings (2008), the examined data show the use of specific discursive devices to stage human suffering as either familiar and therefore personal to audiences or distant and impersonal to their emotional and moral responsibilities towards human affairs. One type of human suffering was staged as that of a people with a familiar and proximate history and culture able to enhance the material and moral life of the host population, while the suffering of another group was utilised, without prompting at times, to signal the net loss of a politics of ethics toward a culturally distant group that ought to legitimately remain in the moral periphery of audiences and decision makers. Discourse that centres the middle-class status of the refugees and their typically European features of ‘blonde’ and ‘blue eyes’ moves humanitarian aims from moral obligations solely on moral grounds to, what Nash calls, “narcissistic sentimentalism” (2008, p. 177) because humanitarian communication is ultimately about the humanitarian agents’ image of their virtue (Boltanski, 1999, p. 101–103). It also illustrates the paradoxical nature of this form of communication because it positions Ukrainians’ refugee crisis as “exceptions to some beneficent, peaceful existence” (Calhoun, 2008, p. 87) whilst normalising Syrians’ status as refugees from regions ‘typically’ in perpetual and therefore ‘understandable’ crisis without acknowledging the geopolitical and neoliberal reasons for some populations’ political conditions of crisis. Thus, the biopolitical governance of Europeans through humanitarian governance of and communication about Ukrainian refugees is about the political and aesthetical rather than the humanitarian and ethical.&nbsp;&nbsp;

This section unpacks the 3 core hermeneutic categories of Foucauldian discourse analysis developed here, before situating emerging discourses within the theoretical framework of compartmentalisation. In doing so, discourse analysis traces how hegemonic discourses are behind policies and practices that shape radically different subjective experiences in the Foucauldian sense, whilst compartmentalisation as a theoretical model explains why radically different discourses and humanitarian outcomes are possible during international crises.Discursive resources: Judeo-Christian European citizenshipPaying analytic attention to the problematization of the object in the process of its discursive construction, the following question was drawn from Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine (2017): under what circumstances and by whom are aspects of human being rendered problematic? What is glaring in the data are matters of identity in the discursive choices and linguistic devices employed to justify the nature and quality of humanitarian responses pertaining to Ukrainian refugees because their refugee status itself is the problem; because refugee status is unexpected for Europeans. That is, this refugee crisis is problematic precisely because Ukrainians are not the “usual” population that has come to be expected to be refugees. The key identity discourse here is based on Judeo-Christian European citizenship:These are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. I mean, that, quite frankly, is part of it. These are Christians. They’re white (Cobiella, NBC News).They look like any European family that you would live next door to (Dobbie, Aljazeera English News).It’s really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed (Sakvarelidze, BBC News).They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country (Hannan, The Telegraph).This is a relatively civilised, relatively European…city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen (D’Agata, CBS News)The latter statement is puzzling because it is curious that one would actively “hope” a refugee crisis is going to happen. The nature and quality of these statements is impactful: these discursive parameters are potent because discourses move beyond language to reveal a practice or an ideology that provides a systematic way of thinking about an issue (Martin,&nbsp;2015, p. 54).&nbsp;They reflect the discursive dominance within, what Foucault (1975) calls regimes of truth, making them part of the common-sense understanding about this type of humanitarian crisis because the expectation that these crises occur elsewhere are presumed to align with existing schema. In problematising the status of Ukrainians as refugees, a status expected of their Syrian counterparts, there was a normalisation that class and socioeconomic status legitimises conflict:Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations (Hannan, The Telegraph).Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing third world nation, this is Europe (Watson, ITV News).What’s compelling is looking at [the refugees], the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people (Dobbie, Aljazeera English News).These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to (Petkov, Associated Press).There is an active effort made in these discourses to humanise Ukrainian refugees as middle-class Europeans with familiar aspects of Western life: free elections, the free press, and entertainment, which in turn problematises their current refugee status because that is reserved for those from non-Western societies.&nbsp;Subject positioning: the familial refugeeDiscourses construct subjects and subject position within a discourse refers to “a location for persons within the structure of rights and duties for those who use that repertoire” (Davies and Harré, 1999, p. 35) creating a system of what can be said or done with the power to enable and constrain. So, what is the action orientation (responsibility) for constructing an object (a refugee event or crisis) to create a specific subject positioning (hierarchies of refugees that are enabled or constrained)?The examined discourses reveal the broader sentiments and beliefs arising from notions of Judeo-Christian European citizenship about the familial refugee: civilized, middle class, blonde and, importantly, European “like us” with the same group membership to the larger European family. It is obvious that not all Ukrainians are blonde featured, but “blonde” and “blue eyes” are used deliberately to signal group membership because these tend to be distinctly European features. Just like the ideal victim in Christie’s seminal work (1986) who is one afforded a legitimate status to be a victim, respectable, non-threatening, and not responsible for their victimhood, this familial refuge is in his peaceful homeland with stable and civilized systems of governance such that warfare is an unusual misfortune that deserves sympathy, particularly because there is a clear aggression of a sovereign state by a foreign power. These were discourses distributed without further explanation about their meaning because they are expected to be recognizable as a part of a pool of common-sense knowledge.Alternatively, the culturally distant threatening, foreign refugee is visibly non-European from areas of state failure and civil war, i.e. uncivilized, from which refugees and asylum seekers are expected. Simultaneously, this type of refugee is also suspicious because civil war is self-inflicted without the clear victims and villains that the Russian aggression of Ukraine provides. Syrians have been portrayed within frames of crisis, risk and threat (Kantor and Cepoi, 2018; Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti, 2016) because it was not certain to discern between the victims and perpetrators of a civil war, making their identity and culpability uncertain (Zagefka et al., 2011; Gallant, 2022). This group is not viewed as being a legitimate victim of the conditions of his state, but a participant in the instability that ultimately lead to his state of migration crisis:This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists (Petkov, Associated Press)These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war (Dobbie, Aljazeera English News)But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades (D’Agata, CBS News)Here, the nationality and geography of the migrants takes precedence in highlighting their dissimilarity from the intended audience and consumer of these news items. It reveals the process of dehumanisation within orientalist discourses of the unworthy victim (Arif, 2018). These linguistic choices are designed to create categories of belonging based on point of origin and identity, rather than refugee status as defined by the United Nations 1951 Refuge Convention. Europeans expressing concern about the overwhelming numbers of Syrian refugees fleeing into Europe in 2015, often within frames of threat, risk (Langdon, 2018; Vezovnik, 2018) and economic burdens (Arif, 2018; Gallant, 2022) fraying the European fabric due to the limited experience of significant flows of inward migration in the Eastern bloc (Economist Intelligence, 2015), now seemed to be capable of accepting significantly larger numbers of Ukrainian refugees in one week because Europe sees itself responsible for Ukrainian safety.In addition, refugee accommodation camps were considered unsuitable for Ukrainian women and children – a starkly different set of discourses concerning their Syrian counterparts and unaccompanied minors; even when the trauma, victimisation, and refugee status of both Syrians and Ukrainians are recognised, Syrians faced more obstacles in matters of legal and administrative considerations, as well as the economic burdens of accommodating them (Gallant, 2022). These discourses powerfully illustrate the dissonance between competing compartments of humanitarianism and dehumanisation within the same national (European) collective identity. It is no surprise that Europeans feel empathy for their fellows because empathy manifests for those who are “identifiable victims” and with whom there is proximity, cultural or otherwise; however, empathy is a weak compass with which to make moral decisions because it is emotive, biased, and limiting with a numbing effect about the plight of many (Bloom, 2017). Instead, moral decisions should employ “rational compassion” because its ability to direct attention to those not previously considered and culturally distant is more conducive of the common good (Bloom, 2017). When cultural proximity and identity, not human rights principles, are the sociopolitical capital that afford trustworthiness and empathy, the delineation between European and Middle-Eastern translates to policies of border control and movement on certain categories of refugees, thereby enabling some whilst constraining others in the production of a social reality with subjective experiential implications.SubjectificationPeople’s subjective experience is impacted by the positionings made in discourses. Discourse is entwined with power and therefore the production of knowledge and truth because “it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power” (Foucault, 1980, p. 52). As Foucault (1982) elaborates, “this form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him” which both the individual and his society must recognize, turning individuals into subjects by either making them subject to someone else’s control and dependence or by the individual’s ties “to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge”. It is the former meaning of subject this article examines: subject to others’ power, by control or dependence.The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February, 2022. According to Statista (2023), almost 8 million refugees have been registered across Europe within 1 year. The Syrian civil war began on 15 March 2011. In the span of a decade, over 1 million have been accepted in Europe, with 70 % residing in Germany and Sweden; this is the same number of Ukrainians accepted warmly within only 1 week (UNHCR, 2021). Granted the context in which these two wars have occurred are significantly different: Ukraine is a sovereign state invaded by Russia, while the Syrian conflict arose form a failed Arab Spring that led to a civil war. Further, many of the countries accepting Ukrainian refugees see Ukraine as the last wall of defence from Russia’s military power. There is also the EU-Ukraine Association 2014 Agreement that allows Ukrainians to travel in the EU without visas, which is not the case for the aforementioned non-EU refugees from across the world.&nbsp;However, beyond the obvious geopolitical calculus in refugee policy decision making, this article is interested in the language that was employed against this backdrop because language is not neutral existing in vacuum waiting to be discovered as an objective measure of reality. The “language-game” is woven in a wider social context with context-specific meaning (Wittgenstein, 1967) and reveals a larger system of thought (Foucault, 1980); it is a tool of constructing reality and reveals the sociocultural and political dynamics in which it exists with the power to affect individuals’ subjective experiences. Even if there are multiple sites of power that can produce alternative discourses to challenge hegemonic ones (Foucault, 1980) not all discourses are equal in their meaning or legitimacy because “some are centred (the centripetal) and others are marginalised (centrifugal)” (Baxter, 2011, p. 14).&nbsp;And thus, discourses shape outcomes: The International Organisation for Migration (2016) estimates the number of Syrian fatalities in the Mediterranean at 3,771 in 2015. The UN Human Rights Office (2022) estimates that 306,887 civilians were killed by March 2021. Syrian refugees’ ambiguous subject positions have left them with legal and humanitarian insecurity in Turkey – the country with the majority of these refugees – because of international border politics (Baban et al., 2017). Similarly, food insecurity and mental health vulnerability continue to affect Syrians in Lebanon (Abou-Rizk et al., 2022). Despite both groups’ status of refugee and experience of trauma, Syrians faced more obstacles in matters of legal, administrative, and economic burden considerations (Gallant, 2022).The examined discourses illuminate the nature of biopolitical communication. They reveal humanitarian communication practices that “sell suffering in ethically questionable ways…and they fundamentally challenge basic humanitarian principles of humanity” (Kennedy, 2009, p. 6). Indeed, this form of communication is not “ethically pure” (Calhoun, 2008, p. 90) but contingent on the political and material and, in this case, on the biologically aesthetic quality of the sufferer in the aim of mobilizing action. However, unlike the humanitarian communication that aims to serve as “moral education” by discursive proposals of how audiences should feel and act (Chouliaraki, 2010), in this instance, it was an affirmation and assertion about how audiences were already feeling or presumed to likely be feeling about the plight of their fellow Europeans, leading to “common sense” discursive devices such as “but of course these are Christians, Europeans, middle class”, etc. Far from the “politics of pity” to motivate action (Boltanski, 1999) where pity is accompanied by Western superiority simultaneously distanced from its targets and with disdain for the inferior (Douzinas, 2007), the examined discourses engage in a politics of solidarity with fellows of similar heritage, history, and biological aesthetic. In doing so, humanitarian communication facilitates population management of both the recipients and agents of humanitarian action.

Biopolitical governtmentality through humanitarian communication of the aesthetic

Supplementary material&nbsp;Appendix A<h1>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Gravitas: Western media's racist reportage on Ukrainian refugees, 28 Feb 2022 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRwmTVVKQk" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRwmTVVKQk</a></h1><h1>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The West Asia Post | Europe welcomes Ukrainians, shuns others, 13 March 2022</h1><h1><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRY7E_RFBVk" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRY7E_RFBVk</a></h1><h1>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Hypocritical Media Coverage of Ukraine vs. the Middle East, 1 March 2022</h1><h1><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z9UyPurVok" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z9UyPurVok</a> &nbsp;</h1><h1>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Comparing Ukrainian refugee crisis with Syrian refugee crisis, 6 Mar 2022 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S30JLr1Dn8" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S30JLr1Dn8</a></h1><h1>All of these videos discuss the double standards in the European response to refugees depending on whether they are Ukrainian or Syrian, rather than refugee status. The first 3 draw from various and overlapping news networks’ clips to make their argument so only these are considered as the first stage of data collection, because the fourth is only an interview with one activist rather than a critique of a series of comments made in various clips from different mainstream news sources. The first 2 videos are from WION - World is One News – who describe their network as non-biased examiner of global issues with in-depth analysis. The third video is from Now This News - an American progressive social media-focused news organization with Vox Media as its parent company.</h1><h1>&nbsp;</h1><h1>After multiple viewings of the 3 videos, the author then went to the original news sources to examine the context in which these assertions were made. These are described further below:</h1>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In a news item by CBS USA titled ‘Russia closes in on Kyiv with more explosions reported across Ukraine overnight’ CBS senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata is reporting on the Russian military getting closer to Kyiv, with fears are growing that Russia might take the Ukrainian capital.&nbsp; When the anchor makes a comment that Ukrainians didn’t expect Russia would go this far, D’Agata elaborates how that calculus changed entirely when the Russians started marching closer before adding @11:22: ‘But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European&nbsp; - I have to choose those words carefully too – city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen’. There was no challenge from the anchors as he continues to report about the state of affairs: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXYrbCCErSo&amp;ab_channel=CBSNews" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXYrbCCErSo&amp;ab_channel=CBSNews</a><h1>&nbsp;</h1>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In this news item titled ‘War in Europe: ITV News special update as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine | ITV News’ ITV correspondent Laura Watson who is at one of the main crossing points, a train station, in Poland is asked (@ 50:54) about the many Ukrainians fleeing to Poland. Watson describes the scene of arrivals at this station and the scale of their displacement. The anchor then asks if Poland is being generally welcoming and helpful (@ 55:30) to which a now more emotional Watson responds by describing the number of people who need help who include many children before adding (@57:17): ‘Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing third world nation, this is Europe’. Another anchor in the studio replies with ‘your empathetic reporting Lucy is so moving and striking’ before asking if Ukrainians will feel grateful or betrayed that the West hasn’t don’t more, while the anchor adds (@59:28) ‘I tell you what Lucy, every time you’ve given a report…I think it’s made a lot of us emotional, especially those of us like you, who have children…so thank you’ before that segment finally ends: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqKtKSeJ5Xw&amp;ab_channel=ITVNews" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqKtKSeJ5Xw&amp;ab_channel=ITVNews</a>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Peter Dobbie, Aljazeera English anchor describes the situation to his guest as follows: ‘What’s compelling is looking at [the refugees], the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to’: <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism</a>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In this NBC ‘Ukraine Invasion’ coverage, an anchor comments on the large numbers of refugees being accepted by Poland in the span of 24 hours (15,000 people); a country that was very hesitant in the last refugee crisis of 2015 during the Syrian conflict before asking what has now changed to make the country more welcoming. Kelly Cobiella, an NBC News correspondent explains: ‘Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria. These are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. I mean, that, quite frankly, is part of it. These are Christians. They’re white, they’re very similar to people who live in Poland’. Unlike other correspondents, Cobiella seems to be offering an explanation for why Poland is more welcoming to Ukrainians than Syrians: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/QudsNen/videos/watch-here-is-another-episode-of-the-western-mainstream-medias-double-standards-/524818009062869/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/QudsNen/videos/watch-here-is-another-episode-of-the-western-mainstream-medias-double-standards-/524818009062869/</a>5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In news coverage titled ‘Russian Invasion of Ukraine’, a BBC anchor reports that all Ukrainians are answering their president’s call to defend their country (1:02:50), followed by a lengthy discussion with former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor general David Sakvarelidze about the scale of the war, the might of Russia in comparison to Ukraine, and the bravery of Ukraine compared to the politicking of the West. As the anchor tries to interrupt for further questions Sakvarelidze continues with (@1:18:47): ‘It’s really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed, children being killed every day with Putin’s missiles’. This was a comment by a guest and not an anchor but he was not challenged to avoid unbiased coverage according to BBC policy. The anchor replied with ‘Sir, of course I understand and respect the emotion, what you’re outlining there is this tension between longer term pressure to apply to Vladimir Putin… and the very immediate threat which you’re experiencing…’: <a href="https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/3BF006C1?bcast=136331078" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/3BF006C1?bcast=136331078</a>6.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In an article The Telegraph titled “Vladimir Putin’s monstrous invasion is an attack on civilisation itself”, Daniel Hannan begins with: ‘They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone’ before discussing the shattered world order due to the West’s ‘smug sense of security’ which has distracted it with matters of identity politics and gender fluidity while Russia makes its desired advances: <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/26/vladimir-putins-monstrous-invasion-attack-civilisation/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/26/vladimir-putins-monstrous-invasion-attack-civilisation/</a>7.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister speaking to journalists explains: ‘These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists’ so “In other words, there is not a single European country now which is afraid of the current wave of refugees”:<a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-refugees-diversity-230b0cc790820b9bf8883f918fc8e313" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-refugees-diversity-230b0cc790820b9bf8883f918fc8e313</a> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

MethodologyIn order to examine the discursive and linguistic devices employed in covering the humanitarian crisis of the Russian war in Ukraine, this article draws from Willig’s (2008) 6-step model of Foucauldian discourse analysis:1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Discursive constructions: different ways a discursive object (i.e. refugee crisis) is constructed by the implicit and explicit references about the object2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Discourses: difference discourses that arise and their location within wider sociopolitical contexts (e.g. Ukrainians are genuine refugees because of Russian aggression)3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Action Orientation: what is the function of constructing the object in a particular way? That is, who is responsible here (e.g. the EU is for Ukrainians but not Syrians)?4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Positionings: what is the position of the subject involved in the discourse? Active/passive? Which “way of being” is enabled/constrained?5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Practice: what can people do given their “positionings”? What is the possibility of action?6.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Subjectivity: what do people experience given the positionings made in discourses?What is apparent from the aims of these steps (and the initial analysis of the data) is that these can in turn be grouped to form – what this article will name – core hermeneutic categories. That is, the first 2 steps are similar because the first is interested in the different ways an object is constructed and the second in how those constructs are situated in a social context.Hermeneutically speaking, the first step is not engaging in the construction of an object or problem outside a socio-political context, making both steps highly overlapping in the meaning they aim to extract from the data: “different ways a discursive object is constructed” (e.g. refugee crisis, risk, threat) is highly overlapping in its meaning (in what it is about), if not often the same, with “different discourses that arise” (e.g. national security, cultural preservation). Thus, this first hermeneutic category will be referred to as: discursive resources.Steps 3-5 aim to extract the subject positionings that arise from the first 2 steps of discursive object construction; that is, the function of the object construction on the subject actions in order to determine the subject agency. This second category will be called subject positioning: i.e., as a function of object construction what can subjects do and who is responsible? The third category, concerned with the subjective experiences that follow discourses and modes of making human beings subjects, is called subjectification. In addition, the approach by Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine (2017) offers an additional layer of clarity by adding the initial step of problematizations to subject positioning and subjectification. They argue that when selecting an object of discourse to examine its construction, analytic attention may be directed to problems that allow certain systems of thought so we may engage in a “progressive politics of the present”. Problematisation will be considered in the first category of discursive resources because it allows the inquiry to be grounded in the “wider politics of the present” and its constructions in local settings (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2017).&nbsp;Data CollectionThe impetus for this study began with the author’s widespread consumption of the news covering the political spectrum and observation of the discursive choices made by some public figures in the immediate aftermath of the war. A number of outlets, such as WION, Now This News, and Aljazeera English to name a few, raised question about whether Europe was behaving differently with Ukrainian refugees, with a more humane approach than was shown to Syrians. In order to examine these assertions more systematically, the following approach was employed:i)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; On Google Videos, searching for “response to Ukrainian refugees” yielded 355,000 videos on March 25, 2023. This number is likely to shift but customising the time-frame on “Tools” (see next step) does give the same data regardless of the search date.ii)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Initial scanning of the first 5 pages shows that videos discussing the distinctions in global responses to Ukrainian refugees occurred mostly within the first month of the war. Accordingly, narrowing data from the start of the war on 24 February to 31 March 2022, and limiting to 4-20-minute videos yields 1,010 videos. When the “source” feature of the Tools was selected for “<a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://Youtube.com">Youtube.com</a>” sources, the sample was further reduced to 69 videos. This yields all news-based videos uploaded on YouTube within this period, rather than those from one channel like Aljazeera.iii)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Videos were selected for analysis based on the explicit nature of their title pertaining to the themes of this article; for example, “Comparing Ukrainian refugee crisis with Syrian refugee crisis”. Where there was uncertainty, such as “Canada trying something new with Ukrainian refugee response”, an initial viewing determined whether the video was relevant for inclusion; mere policy conversations were not considered if there was no comparison made with Syrian refugees so as to adhere to the purposive sampling approach (Etikan, 2016) employed here. Videos with relevant titles for this study (e.g. “Ukraine response shows Australia's refugee hypocrisy”) that were in fact written opinion pieces with a different video content upon further examination, were not included.iv)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The final sample of videos (n=4) in Appendix A of the supplementary file explicitly discussed matters of identity that influenced decision making, and showed a collection of discourses used to legitimise the differential treatment between Ukrainian and Syrian refugees. Adding “versus Syrian refugees” or “and Syrian refugees” to the original search term results in the same overlapping videos.&nbsp;The sample of 4 videos was viewed multiple times enough to transcribe the key quotes that reveal recurrent discourses about the subject matter and their context; key quotes that formed part of the critiques made in these videos. These were further shortlisted to a final sample of 3 videos because only these were drawing from the same news sources (i.e. CBS, ITV, NBC, etc.) to make claims about the differential language and treatment of refugees based on identity (the 4th was merely an interview with an activist). For good measure, the author also obtained the original clips of concern from CBS, NBC, ITV, BBC, Aljazeera English, Associated Press, and The Telegraph. To be sure, these clips are not the totality of the discourses under examination (i.e. there are similar comments made in other news channels) but only those used in the final sample of the 3 videos critiquing the language around humanitarian responses based on national and ethnic identity.Analysing the claims made in all of these mainstream news outlets reveals a much wider stance on this issue packaged in the dominant discourses, than simply the editorial decision-making of one outlet. Instead, this approach reveals a much more potent inter-media agenda-setting at play – which is the influence mass media outlets have on each other and shape the overall agenda by mirroring each other’s content. Quality online and television news – like the sources considered in this study – are in a position to report news faster and therefore function as inter-media agenda-setters and opinion leaders (Lim, 2006; Vonbun et al., 2016). Furthermore, this influence is not just nationally but internationally relevant: wealthier countries with higher political and economic status set the tone attracting most of the news attention on global events (Guo and Vargo, 2017) and affect the direction of information flow (Segev, 2016) with the capacity to influence the world order (Miskimmon et al., 2014). Even emerging media heavily rely on traditional news values from mainstream news organisations (Tandoc, 2017). It is within this context that this study considers the news outlets in the sample from the United Kingdom (ITV, BBC, The Telegraph), United States (CBS, NBC, Associated Press) and Qatar (Aljazeera English) because their status as mainstream news organisations in the highest GDP nations situates them as international agenda-setters and opinion leaders through dominant discourses. Importantly, they are also representative of the political spectrum providing insight into the dominant discourses and schema in these societies: The Telegraph is considered predominantly (73%) right-learning by those polled about UK newspapers (YouGov, 2017) while NBC News (63%), BBC (69%), and CBS News (55%) are trusted by those with mostly liberal leanings (Pew, 2014).&nbsp;Multiple viewings of these videos (the 3 in final sample and the original clips on which the shortlisted 3 relied to make their claims) allowed familiarization with the data as an essential aspect of qualitative research (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008) in order to convert the material to text, noting down initial ideas, selecting each sentence as the unit of analysis, and studying the manifest and latent content. The author coded inductively for qualitatively meaningful units (Chenail, 2012) multiple times with days between coding until saturation (same codes at different times until no new codes emerged) to ensure intra-coder reliability. This is preferred because it enhances reflexivity (Joffe &amp; Yardley, 2003) and consistency in ways that reflexive discussions between coders would not (Morse, 1997) because the attempt to reach an agreement is akin to the author teaching others how to code like them. Thereafter, themes – repetitive patters in the data – were extracted drawing from Braun and Clarke’s 6-step guide (2006). This approach enables the study of how the issue was framed to construct a particular narrative and discourse by examining linguistic elements such as syntax, theme, script and rhetoric (Pan and Kosicki, 1993); i.e. the linguistic devices that construct news discourses. Framing involves emphasis on a particular aspect of an issue while ignoring other aspects so as to make the former more memorable and influential to audiences (DeVreese, 2005; Edelman, 1993; Entman, 1993). However, emphasis on one aspect is not necessarily influential unless it aligns with audiences previously held schema (Donsbach, 2004; Entman, 1993); in this case, the expectation that some population groups are unsurprisingly refugees because they originate from politically unstable regions whilst others are not ordinarily displaced persons. Thereafter, the aforementioned 3 hermeneutic categories of discourse analysis were employed to extract from the textual data the discursive parameters and linguistic devices that compose each category examined in the analysis section below.&nbsp;

Biopolitical governmentality of Europeans though the humanitarian governmentality of Ukrainians serves Europeans because it offers biosocial, emotional, and moral gains. Further, humanitarian communication is a tool of biopolitical governmentality because it is not based on purely ethical grounds but the political and material conditions.

IntroductionIt is hard to miss the war in Ukraine and the almost global solidarity with its people. But it is equally evident that this level of empathy was not so visible when Syrians were also fleeing war, not to mention other victims of warfare in recent times like the Rohingya, Ethiopians, or Yemenis. Europe, once concerned by the overwhelming “wave” of migration in 2015 is open to accept the same number of Ukrainian refugees in the span of a week as it did Syrians over a decade: over a million Ukrainians have been welcomed warmly in neighbouring countries within a week, which is about the same number of Syrians accepted to Europe over the course of a decade (UNHCR, 2021) described as a crisis (Abbas, 2019) or an oriental threat (Arif, 2018) of refugees considered by then British Prime Minister Theresa May to be “the ones who are strong and rich enough to come to Europe” (Spiegel Online, 2015). Some foreign correspondents have employed linguistic devices of identity to justify why Europeans find it easier to be kinder to Ukrainian refugees: they are “blonde” with “blue eyes” who “watch Netflix” (examined below) – language which has led to criticisms about Western duplicity, racism, and hypocrisy during humanitarian crises. This article draws from Foucauldian discourse analysis as an analytic strategy to study the discursive choices made pertaining to Syrian and Ukrainian refugees. It also employs Foucault’s thesis of biopolitics and governmentality as a way of making sense of the rationale behind these discourses and the nature of humanitarian communication.&nbsp;Theoretical FrameworkThis study employs Foucauldian discourse analysis as the theoretical framework that informs the methodology and the analysis. It is an approach informed by Michel Foucault’s work such as The History of Madness (1961), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), The Birth of the Clinic (1975) and The History of Sexuality trilogy (1985, 1986, 1990). For Foucault (1980), discourse is a social system of thought that defines what is sayable and unsayable – what is “truth” – during a specific historical moment. Discourse refers to historically contingent “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972) and language is but one aspect of discourse. This approach allows the study of discursive frames by considering what rules permit certain statements to be made, decide truthful or false statements, and allow for the construction of a classificatory system (Philips, 1985) making it a useful tool of analysis when interested in how or why individuals behave or believe as they do (Springer and Clinton, 2015). And a component of discourse – language use – reveals the linguistic resources and social positions of the speakers; that is, discourse reveals power dynamics. The Foucauldian approach to discourse moves beyond the social constructionist approach which calls attention to subjective reality but does not distinguish between the voices of the powerful from those of the marginalised (Khan and MacEachen, 2021): e.g. the voices of host nations from those of refugees seeking asylum. Given that discourse is tied to power, one’s subjective experience is constituted by discourses designed to regulate behaviour or people; a form of power that position individuals to subjects who are subject to others by control or dependence (Foucault, 1982). Thus, language is not just descriptive but influences and constructs the social world moving beyond describing, into doing; language is action (Austin, 1975) making discourses actions that facilitate and limit, enable and constrain what can be said, by whom, where, and when (Parker, 1992).&nbsp;In addition to the power imbedded in dominant discourses that affect the subjective experiences of subjects, the regulation and administration of life and populations – the biopolitics of populations – provides a useful framework to understanding humanitarian communication and response to different groups of refugees based on origin and identity. Biopolitics refers to the historical shift from the need to protect the sovereign under juridical power to the need to protect society or populations under biopower; “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of biopower” (Foucault, 1978, p. 140), which is “a closely meshed grid of material coercions” (Foucault, 2003, p. 36) rather than ultimate and vertical power by a sovereign. In this system of governmentality, even “waging battle” becomes necessary “against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage” in the administration and management of life and populations (2003, p. 61) in defence of a society. Biopolitical governmentality (concerned with the well-being of populations) manifests, though partially, in the humanitarian government (politics of individual life) of refugees in order to “maximise the biological and emotional life of the host population” (Mavelli, 2017). Using the conceptual framework of biopolitical governmentality can thus reveal not just the possibility but necessity and even unavoidability of the emergent discourses examined here, in matters of humanitarian crises that depend on the type of refugees that pose biosocial threat compared to those who provide material and emotional well-being; that is, biopolitical governmentality of Europeans though the humanitarian governmentality of Ukrainians serves Europeans because it offers biosocial, emotional, and moral gains.Here, humanitarian communication becomes pertinent because it is through these “rhetorical practices of transnational actors” that universal ethical claims about collective identity are made to mobilize action (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 108); it’s a form of communication not only concerned with merely informing audiences about human suffering, but is instead aimed at mobilizing empathy to inspire action on human suffering (Chouliaraki and Vestergaard, 2021). Using “the vocabulary of suffering [and] responsibility to protect” is part of a political life designed to legitimise some issues and justify specific decisions accordingly (Fassin, 2011). And as such, this article argues that humanitarian communication during the Russia and Ukraine crisis relied on media and political actors turning the suffering of fellow Europeans into language and imagery of legitimate vulnerability for collective action and sympathy based not only on ethics or collective identity for that matter, but the biological aesthetic value. In doing so the article advances critical perspectives in humanitarian communication by presenting it as a tool of biopolitical governmentality of Europeans through humanitarian governmentality of Ukrainians because humanitarian communication is not based on purely ethical grounds but the political and material conditions.&nbsp;

Meron Wondemaghen

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