Project Description

In the past years, the number of refugees and asylum seekers has increased substantially across the world. This has increased the pressure on destination countries to open up their borders to those seeking protection. The project aimed to understand how the admission or rejection of refugees is debated in six different countries by comparing the public discourses on refugees in six countries: Chile, Germany, Poland, Singapore, Turkey and Uganda. We first reconstructed the arguments, narratives and frames mobilized in public discourses to justify the admission or exclusion of forced migrants. Then, we attempted to explain differences in the framing of refugees between countries and within countries. The argument was that the variety of national discourses on the admission of refugees is primarily shaped by a country’s national self-understanding and how actors construct a nation’s collective identity. Accordingly, differences in the definition of one's own identity lead to differences in the definition of “otherness”.

Research Questions

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?

Research Approach

The project took a cultural sociological perspective, emphasizing the importance of framing processes. It assumed that refugee policies are shaped by how governments and opposition parties frame their countries’ collective identity on the one hand and the identity and characteristics of the refugees on the other.

We conducted a qualitative comparative discourse analysis of parliamentary debates in these six countries from different regions of the world 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 toward Rohingya refugees; and Uganda facing the displacement from South Sudan. The study also included interviews with key actors in the public sphere to understand their discursive strategies.

Relation to the Liberal Script

Nation states’ duty to admit refugees is a key element of the liberal script, well justified in liberal political theory and inscribed in international law after World War II. According to international law, all countries are equally obliged not to push back refugees and asylum seekers and not to discriminate between them on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, origin etc. In practice, however, countries vary widely in terms of their public discourses on refugees and asylum seekers, and the number and kinds of refugees they admit.

Core Findings

The empirical findings of the project showed that governments and opposition parties only rarely refer to liberal principles and international law when debating whether to admit refugees. What is central to understand the refugee policy of both the governments and the opposition parties is how they frame the national identity of their country and what characteristics they attribute to refugees and on which cultural repertoire they draw by defining the “we” and the “others”. For example, Turkey’s open-door policy toward Syrian refugees under President Erdoğan becomes understandable only if one takes into account how Turkey’s national identity is framed with reference to the Ottoman Empire and Islam. The restrictive policy of the conservative Polish government towards Syrian refugees becomes comprehensible only if one takes into account the definition of Polish identity with reference to Christianity and the fear of losing national sovereignty.

Academic Innovations

In conceptual terms, the project developed a proposal to define the "liberal script" concerning borders and systematize its main contestations, highlighting a tension between individual and collective self-determination. This liberal border script aims to limit state discretion in border control, emphasizing the universal right to cross-border interactions, which include communication, economic transactions, movement of people, and military intervention, as grounded in international law.

Methodologically, the project formulated a system of categories to analyse and compare public discourse on migrant and refugee admission across countries, and a typology of frames capturing key public discourse frames on refugee admission. These tools can guide future research projects.

Publications

Drewski, Daniel / Gerhards, Jürgen 2024: Framing Refugees. How the Admission of Refugees is Debated in Six Countries Across the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drewski, Daniel / Gerhards, Jürgen 2024: Why do states discriminate between refugee groups? Understanding how Syrian and Ukrainian refugees were framed in Germany and Poland, American Journal of Cultural Sociology.

Drewski, Daniel / Gerhards, Jürgen 2024: The Liberal Border Script and Its Contestations: An Attempt at Definition and Systematization, in: Börzel, Tanja A. / Gerschewski, Johannes / Zürn, Michael (eds.): The Liberal Script at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Conceptions, Components, and Tensions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drewski, Daniel / Gerhards, Jürgen 2021: How Refugees are Interpreted in Public Debates in Different Countries. First Results of a Comparative Project, Berlin: Verhandlungen des 40. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie 2020.

Drewski, Daniel / Gerhards, Jürgen 2020: The Liberal Border Script and its Contestations. An Attempt of Definition and Systematization, Scripts Working Paper No. 4.