The boy on the beach: Shifts in US policy discourses on Syrian asylum following the death of Alan Kurdi

Abstract

The impact of iconic imagery on policymaking during humanitarian crises is oft-discussed within the literature. When rapid humanitarianization or sudden policy shifts emerge, researchers seek to identify why. One potential explanation is that of ‘focusing events’ – sudden, harmful events which destabilize political consensuses and elevate marginal agendas. While focusing events have been used to explain the impact of large-scale accidents and disasters, this paper extends their usage to activist-generated events such as the iconization of images of the drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 migrant crisis. In exploring the Kurdi images’ impact on US media and political discourses of asylum, this paper finds that asylum-related discourses became increasingly sympathetic and domestically focused, eventually culminating in the announcement of an increase in resettlement targets for Syrian migrants. By expanding conceptualizations of focusing events to cases such as Kurdi’s, this paper supplements understandings of the agenda-setting function of iconic imagery.