The conclusion of the first cycle of the German Research Foundation's Excellence Strategy for SCRIPTS marks an intensive phase of publications. The new book series with Oxford University Press provides SCRIPTS researchers with a valuable platform for publishing their work. All books have been published as open-access works and can be accessed free of charge.

The first volume in the series, "Framing Refugees – How the Admission of Refugees is Debated in Six Countries across the World", by Principal Investigator Jürgen Gerhards and Daniel Drewski, who worked as a Postdoc at SCRIPTS and is now a Junior Professor at the University of Bamberg, examines how various countries respond to the arrival of refugees—whether by closing their borders, offering extensive protection, or selectively admitting specific groups while excluding others.

Based on a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates in six countries, the authors show, 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”, Gerhards explains.