The refugee crisis and fear

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 321-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gale

Representations of asylum seekers, commonly referred to as ‘boat people’, became a central issue during the 2001 election campaign amidst claims that Australia was at risk of a flood of refugees. This article explores the intersection between populist politics and media discourse through analysis of media representations of refugees and asylum seekers.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-228
Author(s):  
Skolastika Genapang Maing

Australia as one of the countries that signed the Convention of Refugee 1951 has an obligation to apply principle of non-refoulement in the handling of refugees and asylum seekers entering its territory. However, the issue of national security and domestic turmoil caused Australia to continue use restrictive policies in dealing with refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who came by the sea (boat people) and did not have official documents. They are called Illegal Maritime Arrivals (IMA). Giving the term “illegal” causes no distinction between IMA and smuggling/trafficking criminals. This paper aims to explain the existence of dilemma in the management of refugees especially in Australia in handling IMA. This research uses qualitative methods with secondary data sources from books, journals, articles and other sources related to the problem being studied. By using the concept of securitization approach in the paradigm of constructivism, this paper argue that the restrictive policies adopted by Australia as a form of protection of national interests. Australia experiences a dilemma in applying the principle of non-refoulement and protecting its national interests. This is challenge in the management of global refugees.


Refuge ◽  
2003 ◽  
pp. 25-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Leach

Throughout late 2001 and 2002, the Australian Government, seeking re-election, campaigned on a tough line against so-called “illegal” immigrants. Represented as “queue jumpers,” “boat people,” and “illegals,” most of these asylum seekers came from Middle Eastern countries, and, in the main, from Afghanistan and Iraq. This paper explores the way particular representations of cultural difference were entwined in media and government attacks upon asylum seekers. In particular, it analyzes the way key government figures articulated a negative understanding of asylum seekers’ family units – representing these as “foreign” or “other” to contemporary Australian standards of decency and parental responsibility. This representational regime also drew upon post-September 11 representations of Middle Eastern people, and was employed to call into question the validity of asylum-seekers’ claims for refugee status. Manufactured primarily through the now notorious “children overboard” incident, these images became a central motif of the 2001 election campaign. This paper concludes by examining the way these representations of refugees as “undeserving” were paralleled by new Temporary Protection Visa regulations in Australia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Glanville

AbstractOne of the justifications offered by European imperial powers for the violent conquest, subjection, and, often, slaughter of indigenous peoples in past centuries was those peoples’ violation of a duty of hospitality. Today, many of these same powers—including European Union member states and former settler colonies such as the United States and Australia—take increasingly extreme measures to avoid granting hospitality to refugees and asylum seekers. Put plainly, whereas the powerful once demanded hospitality from the vulnerable, they now deny it to them. This essay examines this hypocritical inhospitality of former centers of empire and former settler colonies and concludes that, given that certain states accrued vast wealth and territory from the European colonial project, which they justified in part by appeals to a duty of hospitality, these states are bound now to extend hospitality to vulnerable outsiders not simply as a matter of charity, but as justice and restitution for grave historical wrongs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (Summer) ◽  
pp. 46-58
Author(s):  
Marlene Soulier

Discourses relating to gender and sexualities have long been a tool for the perpetuation of racialized “othering” and have contributed to the strengthening of national identities and boundaries as they reproduce binary constructions of “us” and “them.” As the German nation-state reinvents itself as multicultural, tolerant, and sexually liberated, these discourses serve to mark the racialized body as a site of backwardness, sexism, and homophobia, and thus justify its segregation and exclusion exemplified in the restrictive practices of housing, mobility restrictions, and deportation of asylum seekers and migrants. This paper aims to trace the unfolding of discourses in and between some dominant organizational structures in Berlin that advocate for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. It argues that the claim for citizenship of some formerly excluded sexual others is contingent on the promotion of a very specific notion of sexual identity and participation in the orientalisation/ethnicisation of homophobia.


Author(s):  
Rachel Humphris ◽  
Hannah Bradby

The health status of refugees and asylum seekers varies significantly across the European region. Differences are attributed to the political nature of the legal categories of “asylum seeker” and “refugee”; the wide disparities in national health services; and the diversity in individual characteristics of this population including age, gender, socioeconomic background, country of origin, ethnicity, language proficiency, migration trajectory, and legal status. Refugees are considered to be at risk of being or becoming relatively “unhealthy migrants” compared to those migrating on the basis of economic motives, who are characterized by the “healthy migrant effect.” Refugees and asylum seekers are at risk to the drivers of declining health associated with settlement such as poor diet and housing. Restricted access to health care whether from legal, economic, cultural, or language barriers is another likely cause of declining health status. There is also evidence to suggest that the “embodiment” of the experience of exclusion and marginalization that refugee and asylum seekers face in countries of resettlement significantly drives decrements in the health status of this population.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (01) ◽  
pp. 20-31
Author(s):  
Natalie Zervou

At the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations of refugees and asylum seekers. In this essay, I question the ethics and aesthetics of these methodological approaches utilized for staging encounters between natives and migrants through dance. In particular, I consider the significance of improvisation as potentially perpetuating hierarchical inequalities in the framework of Western concert dance, while I also highlight the ways that such artistic endeavors end up presenting immigrants and refugees as “Others.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (s1) ◽  
pp. 841-863
Author(s):  
Anita Gottlob ◽  
Hajo Boomgaarden

AbstractMedia coverage of migration and migrants can exert considerable influence on the public’s understanding of and attitudes towards migration. During the peak of what has been called ‘the refugee crisis’ in 2015, heated discussions about immigration and its possible impact filled the media landscape. This study focuses specifically on the news framing of insecurities regarding immigration, exploring what we have termed ‘uncertainty frames’ in the coverage of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. This study will thus lend empirical support to a novel attempt to combine the concepts of uncertainty, risk, and framing. These frames were analyzed within French and Austrian media from 2015 to 2016. Drawing on a content analysis of tabloid and broadsheet articles, different types of uncertainty frames (economy, values, society, etc.) as well as different types of solution frames (the kind of solutions provided for the issue of immigration) were examined. Results suggest that even though all frames decrease in salience over time, important variations in different types of uncertainty frames do appear. It is argued that frames related to abstract issues seem to stay more salient throughout time in both countries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-173
Author(s):  
Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi ◽  
A. George Bajalia ◽  
Sami Al-Daghistani

AbstractThe issue “Pluralisms in Emergenc(i)es” is a result of a two-conference series that took place in Amman and Tunis, in December 2017 and October 2018, respectively. Taking these two locations as historical epicenters of human, commodity, and capital mobility, in two connected regions, these conferences set out to interrogate the historical, social, and religious underpinnings of the migrant and refugee crisis in order to position this moment as a state of emergence, rather than a state of emergency. The focus of the essays included here explores pluralism as it has emerged in response to contemporary global crises, and asks a number of questions: What are the variations in how “pluralism” is understood, and how does it function in a time of crisis? What are the material and immaterial modes through which pluralism takes shape? Moreover, how does it change through the circulation of people - as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers – and capital – whether under the auspices of international development funds, religious aid, or new labor markets? By crossing disciplinary boundaries, this special issue enters into a fundamental discussion about how “pluralism” is conceived across sites and offers new vistas for its conceptualization in North Africa and the Middle East.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-105
Author(s):  
Taulant Guma ◽  
Michael Woods ◽  
Sophie Yarker ◽  
Jon Anderson

This article examines the different ways in which local civil society has responded to refugees and asylum seekers in different parts of Wales in the wake of the recent “refugee crisis”. While the events of summer 2015 have generated a considerable amount of scholarly attention, including empirical accounts that look into local community responses to refugees and asylum seekers, the current research has tended to overlook the significance of place and the varied impact of “refugee crisis” across localities; this article aims to fill this gap in the existing research. It draws on findings from qualitative research carried out between 2017 and 2018 with refugee-supporting organisations based in three different locations in Wales. Taking a comparative look at these organisations, the article sheds light on the intensity and variation of civil society response in each of these localities, showing how this is informed by and closely interweaved with processes of place-making and place-framing, contributing to the reshaping of civil society networks and population profiles in these local areas. In conclusion, the article argues that humanitarian responses to “refugee crisis” can be understood not only as instances of hospitality and solidarity but also as practices of locality production.


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