The visual international politics of the European refugee crisis: Tragedy, humanitarianism, borders
| Author | Lene Hansen,Rebecca Adler-Nissen,Katrine Emilie Andersen |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0010836721989363 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836721989363
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(4) 367 –393
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836721989363
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The visual international
politics of the European
refugee crisis: Tragedy,
humanitarianism, borders
Lene Hansen , Rebecca Adler-Nissen
and Katrine Emilie Andersen
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.
Keywords
Discourses, European refugee crisis, mixed visual methods, visual politics
Introduction
The European refugee crisis culminating in 2015 provides a striking example of how
images of suffering and death matter for international politics.1 The photo of Alan Kurdi,
the three-year-old Kurdish-Syrian boy who drowned as his family was trying to get from
Turkey to Greece became an instant global icon in early September 2015. The image of
Kurdi lying lifeless on the shore spread through social media where a wave of sadness,
loss and mourning was expressed, but also anger and the need for the EU and its member
states to do something (Adler-Nissen et al., 2020; Mortensen, 2017; Olesen, 2018).
Corresponding author:
Lene Hansen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353
Copenhagen K., Denmark.
Email: lha@ifs.ku.dk
989363CAC0010.1177/0010836721989363Cooperation and ConflictHansen et al.
research-article2021
Article
368 Cooperation and Conflict 56(4)
Leading politicians responded discursively with expressions of their own emotional
reactions when seeing the photo and politically at the EU level with decisions to reallo-
cate first 40,000 and then 120,000 of those who had made it to Greece and Italy to other
member states. At the national level, Canada, the US and the UK promised to accept
more refugees from the Syrian war while Germany and Sweden kept their borders open
to those who were making it on foot or train through Europe. As Angela Merkel famously
put it, ‘Wir schaffen das’.
No other photo from the European refugee crisis has become as iconic as that of
Kurdi. But many other images have helped produce a visual context for policy-making
within the EU. Photos of body bags on the harbor of Lampedusa in October 2013 com-
municated visually the loss of more than 350 lives as a boat caught fire and sank within
sight of the island. In response, Italy initiated Operation Mare Nostrum, which would
rescue more than 150,000 people over the next 13 months. The EU’s Heads of State and
Governments expressed their ‘deep sadness at the recent and dramatic death of hundreds
of people in the Mediterranean which shocked all Europeans’ and stressed that ‘deter-
mined action should be taken in order to prevent the loss of lives at sea and to avoid that
such human tragedies happen again’ (European Council, 2013a). Several major drown-
ing accidents followed in 2014 and 2015 with more than 1100 people dying in just one
week in April 2015. In the summer of 2015, migration from Turkey to Greece increased
dramatically. Photos of refugees in small inflatable boats making it through the surf onto
Greek shores and of people walking through Europe made headlines. As countries along
the so-called Balkan route closed their borders, photos of refugees trying to get through
fences became another motif in the visualization of the refugee crisis.
Existing research on EU policy-making during the European refugee crisis has pointed
to the importance of photos, though only in passing indicating the need for more in-depth
analysis (Holzberg et al., 2018: 541; Niemann and Zaun, 2018: 7). This article responds
to this need by providing an analysis of the visual environment within which EU policy-
making on migration took place from 2013 to 2015. We trace how the European refugee
crisis was visualized following major political events (large drowning accidents in the
Mediterranean, the death of Alan Kurdi and the first physical confrontations at the border
between Greece and Macedonia), and the European Council’s (the EU’s Heads of State
and Governments) and Justice and Home Affairs Council’s (the EU’s Ministers of Justice
and Home Affairs) decisions and statements made in response thereto. Our analysis
draws on a dataset consisting of 1082 photographs used in news stories on the European
refugee crisis by 14 online newspapers located in seven EU member states.
Our epistemological starting point is constitutive insofar as we assume that visual rep-
resentations matter for policy debates and decision-making, yet we do not seek to trace a
causal effect between the photos of the European refugee crisis and the policies that the
EU adopted (Bleiker, 2015). As research on the CNN effect has brought out, it is very dif-
ficult (and perhaps even impossible) to identify causal effects at a general level, that is, to
prove that a particular kind of image causes military intervention or other specific foreign
policies (Livingston, 2011). Even the case of the iconic photo of Kurdi, which is often said
to have changed European policies on migration, had a more complicated impact on policy
when examined more closely (Adler-Nissen et al., 2020). Our approach is thus to theorize
the relationship between visual representation and policies as one of conditions of
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