Some Human’s Rights: Neocolonial Discourses of Otherness in the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis

Abstract

Taking as my starting point Hannah Arendt’s (1994/1943) observations on the public response to the mass exile of Jews during World War Two, I argue that the UK’s mediatised reaction to those escaping conflict during the Mediterranean refugee crisis followed similar ideological patterns: fear, suspicion, antipathy and reserved compassion. I then move on to examine the role that human rights organisations had in the sympathetic re-construction of migrants/refugees. Here, I argue that at the same time as media platforms have become progressively more intertwined, ideologically complex, and perhaps as a result more responsive to shifting narratives and the changing public mood about the other, non-governmental organisations continue to operate within an established system of representation that render the migrant abject in terms of western dominance. In response to this reading of the refugee crisis, I offer the conclusion that while discourses produced by the various actors with a stake in the construction and counter-construction of the crisis were multifaceted and dynamic in their response to the evolving situation, the competing narratives surrounding the event remained resolutely embedded within a neocolonial discourse of otherness.