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 citizenship
Paying 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, 2015, p. 54). 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.
Subject positioning: the familial refugee
Discourses 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.
Subjectification
People’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.
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). 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.