Introduction
It 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.
Theoretical Framework
This 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).
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.