Constructing muslims as a threat

During the so called refugee crises (henceforth labelled the migrationpolitical crisis) a friend of mine posted on Facebook with regard to the death of Alan Kurdi. My friends post were not part of the public outcry, but instead my friend asked what would happened when all the cameras have been turned off. A couple of months later the Swedish government closed its border and the ongoing political crisis partly faded from public memory. 



The events of 2015 have been the subject of numerous studies and will probably keep future historians quite occupied. A couple of years ago an article was published, written partly by Ruth Wodak who is one of contemporary scholarship s leading expert on migration. The thesis put forward that notion of the events as a crisis were the result of a politics of fear, were Muslims were deemed as a threat towards both domestic security and the access to welfare. By framing the events as threat media tapped into a common xenophobic view of immigrants. 

Similar themes have to a increased degree been discussed in scholarship, since the migrationalpolitical crisis led to a refraiming of immigrants. Since the 1960's refugees have to a large degree been portrayed as the deprived other, people without any resources of their own in need of social support. This notion can be criticized for not giving the group any agency, but it still hold a meaning in the form of forced migration.

In a Finnish study from last year it was showed that refugees during 2015 were described as the undeserving other in Finnish media. For instance the groups use of smartphone and western clothing made them seem like a group trying to get to west by economic rather than humanitarian incentives. Thereby they did not deserve societies proctection nor humane treatment. The fact that Syria previously had been a rather modern country were soon silenced in this debate. 

Even though the previous understanding had not been entirely humane this new understanding is however neither humane or in line with the UN charter of refugee rights. But still it gained popularity within the Nordic countries, were on example is the Danish states legislation that gives the state right to confiscate refugees belongings, thus making Denmark less desirable as both arriving and transit country. This legislation is however not in accordance with the basic principle of asylum, which should be granted depending of the threat level rather than individuals economic standard. 

If we return to my friends Facebook post, what then did happened when the camera lights were turned off? The short answer is an increased problematization of refugees and a creation of the refugees as undeserving and posing a threat towards Europe. Only time will tell were research eventually will lead us, but it is rather clear that the rise of the fascist movements we see today can be part of a changed political landscape that the media unconciously created during a few months of 2015.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more