Conclusion
This 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. 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.