| Abstract [eng] |
Corporeality in International Relations: Analyzing the Representations of Asylum Seekers in the Refugee Crisis Discourse Master thesis “Corporeality in International Relations: Analyzing the Representations of Asylum Seekers in the Refugee Crisis Discourse” seeked to examine the dominating corporeal representations of asylum seekers in the visual and textual discourse. This object stems from a paradox, which has existed during the European migrant crisis – mass migration from Middle East and Northern Africa that has reached its peak in 2015 and is continuing until the present day. Although the European countries described this crisis as a humanitarian issue and appealed to the values of humanity, at the same time they understood asylum seekers as a threat and made political decisions that have isolated migrants from the rest of the European community, applied strategies of “othering” and did not take into account their pleas. The voice of the asylum seekers was silenced so they communicated through their bodies – a medium which also was an object of normative violence implicated by European Governments. In this master thesis tried “to investigate” the body – open it to the international relations and analyze it in the light of critical feminist theory of the body, and ask how the body of the refugee is represented and how the refugee himself/herself reacts to these representations. It argues that by opening the body to the critical analysis one can understand why some policies, social tensions and attitudes develop. In order to discover the representations, one must analyze the discourse – in this work selected mainstream media (BBC, “The Guardian”, “Deutsche Welle”) articles, UNHCR texts and “Reuters” pictures from a one-year period (from 2015-04-19 until 2016-04-19) are being examined. This master thesis is divided into three parts. In the first part the feminist theory of the body is explained and main arguments that justify why is it meaningful to include the body in the analysis of international relations are presented. The second part is dedicated to the methodology and explanation of the chosen analytical tools. The third part is designed for the analysis which is divided into three 87 other segments, conceptually representing the journey of the refugees: 1) the travel by the sea and the shores of the Mediterranean; 2) the land travel and the borders; 3) refugee camps, asylum shelters and life in European countries. The analysis has shown that many security practices during the refugee crisis were based on the representations of the body and in many cases – solely on it. Even the UNHCR agency, that is designed to advocate the rights of the refugees, used the representations that created even bigger divisions between them and the Europeans. The gender also played a role during the crisis – as male refugees were marginalized whereas women were seen as the more deserving, “real refugees”, not economic migrants, and less dangerous. The walls for asylum seekers were built not only as physical barriers between the coutries, but as conceptual and social borders in the societies. The refugees tried to disobey these othering strategies, based on their corporeality, by using their bodies as a medium of protest and disobedience to the source of power. While protecting refugees in camps and shelters, European leaders took them as a body with simple survival needs and in this way the asylum seekers were denied access to the political sphere. In these shelters they were also delimitated from the rest of population and that has created even bigger divisions and sense of a threat. All in all, this work is an attempt to show why bodies matter in international relations and to present an alternative analytical analysis for the Mediterranean refugee crisis. |
