The visual international politics of the European refugee crisis: Tragedy, humanitarianism, borders

Abstract

The European refugee crisis has been communicated visually through images such as those of Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach, by body bags on the harbor front of Lampedusa, by people walking through Europe and by border guards and fences. This article examines the broader visual environment within which EU policy-making took place from October 2013 to October 2015. It identifies ‘tragedy’ as the key term used by the EU to explain its actions and decisions and points out that discourses of humanitarianism and border control were both in place. The article provides a theoretical account of how humanitarianism and border control might be visualized by news photography. Adopting a multi-method design and analyzing a dataset of more than 1000 photos, the article presents a visual discourse analysis of five generic iconic motifs and a quantitative visual content analysis of shifts and continuity across four moments in time. The article connects these visual analyses to the policies and discourses of the EU holding that the ambiguity of the EU’s discourse was mirrored by the wider visual environment.