Framing Refugees

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Across the world, the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes has more than doubled during the last decade. Although international law does not allow states to turn back refugees, some countries close their borders to refugees, some open their borders and grant extensive protection, while others admit some groups of refugees while excluding others. How can we make sense of these different responses to admitting refugees? In this book, Daniel Drewski and Jürgen Gerhards show that governments' refugee policy, as well as the stance adopted by opposition parties on the issue, is heavily dependent on how they frame their country's collective identity on the one hand and the identity and characteristics of the refugees on the other. By defining the "we" and the "others", politicians draw on collectively shared cultural repertoires, which vary by country and by political constituency within a country. The book is based on a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates. It explores the specific framing of nations' identities and the corresponding perceptions of otherness by focusing on six countries that have been confronted with large numbers of refugees: Germany, Poland, and Turkey, all responding to the exodus of Syrian and Middle Eastern refugees; Chile's reaction to the Venezuelan displacement; Singapore and its stance towards Rohingya refugees; and Uganda's response to the displacement from South Sudan. The study explores not only differences between governments of different countries but also the conflicting views of different political parties within the same country. This volume has emerged from research carried out as part of the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script - SCRIPTS", which analyzes the contemporary controversies about liberal ideas, institutions, and practices on the national and international level from a historical, global, and comparative perspective. It connects academic expertise in the social sciences and area studies and collaborates with research institutions in all world regions. Operating since 2019 and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), SCRIPTS unites eight major Berlin-based research institutions: Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), the Hertie School, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the Berlin branch of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO).

Daniel Drewski is Junior Professor for Sociology of Europe and Globalization at the University of Bamberg. Previously, he was a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (SCRIPTS) and the Institute for Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. His main research interests include the sociology of European integration and the sociology of migration, borders, and symbolic boundaries. Jürgen Gerhards is Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. He is a member of the Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. His main research interests include comparative cultural sociology, and the sociology of European Integration.