Threatening – The Refugee as a Threat

Abstract

Contemporary media and public accounts have increasingly framed the refugee ‘crisis’ in terms of security, with refugees considered as masses to be managed and controlled, migrants pointed at with generic allegation of terrorist threat, and state borders closed and militarized. Securitization of migration may not be a new phenomenon (Saunders 2014) but it is one that has recently received a great deal of attention (see among others Bigo 2002; Pugh 2004; Huysmans and Squire 2009; Huysmans 2000; Musarò 2017; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Watson 2009). What all these scholars have in common is that they highlight different ways through which refugees are represented, described, and thought of as threat. Media and public accounts have consistently represented refugees through words such as plight, invasion, flood, hordes, or waves (Friese 2017). The “highly heterogeneous and (too) strongly mediation-dependent European politics created an array of – in most cases negative – interpretations of the Refugee Crisis” (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018). In line with this narrative, at the visual level, the images that have accompanied the news on refugees have mostly included overcrowded boats, long lines of people in need, and looming masses of people crammed at border fences.

1 Introduction: The Refugee as a Threat

Contemporary media and public accounts have increasingly framed the refugee ‘crisis’ in terms of security, with refugees considered as masses to be managed and controlled, migrants pointed at with generic allegation of terrorist threat, and state borders closed and militarized. Securitization of migration may not be a new phenomenon (Saunders 2014) but it is one that has recently received a great deal of attention (see among others Bigo 2002; Pugh 2004; Huysmans and Squire 2009; Huysmans 2000; Musarò 2017; Vaughan-Williams 2015; Watson 2009). What all these scholars have in common is that they highlight different ways through which refugees are represented, described, and thought of as threat. Media and public accounts have consistently represented refugees through words such as plight, invasion, flood, hordes, or waves (Friese 2017). The “highly heterogeneous and (too) strongly mediation-dependent European politics created an array of – in most cases negative – interpretations of the Refugee Crisis” (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018). In line with this narrative, at the visual level, the images that have accompanied the news on refugees have mostly included overcrowded boats, long lines of people in need, and looming masses of people crammed at border fences.

One would expect the discourse of humanitarian organizations to challenge this view and propose an alternative, but this is only partly true. Humanitarian actors, and NGOs in particular, have tried to avoid the mainstream securitization framework and attempted to draw attention to the human, ethical and solidarity dimensions of the refugee issue. At the same time, humanitarian discourse has contributed to its securitization. This happens when refugees are represented as a threat and extraordinary measures (in this case humanitarian) are invoked to face the threat. “But threat to what?” one could ask. It is not possible to identify a unique subject at risk. According to the various securitizing representations, refugees can appear to constitute a risk for international order, legality, the status quo, territory and values.

There are different ways through which humanitarian discourse contributes to the representation of refugees as threatening. When humanitarian actors are perceived and perceive themselves as key player in the management of peoples’ movements (Dillon and Reid 2000), there is an implicit assumption that this movement need to be managed and controlled. As scholars have pointed out, aid agencies are part of a security strategy to contain the disorder created by underdevelopment and wars (Duffield 2007). When NGOs contribute to the framing of an issue in terms of emergency, they automatically bolster calls for extraordinary measures. The exceptionality of the situation requires exceptional management to solve the state of emergency (Williams 2003). When refugees are represented as an indistinguishable group of people, their individuality, history, and context are erased not only from the picture in the literal meaning but also from our imaginary of the situation that has caused their displacement in the first place. Moreover, a certain kind of representation of the refugee issue as something drastically different from our own lives, or distant from our here and now ends up creating a ‘we’ the spectator of the crisis, and a ‘they’, the refugees, ultimately underpinning dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (Szörényi 2006).

Narratives like the ones just described are of course noticeable at the visual level. In front of a picture of lonely child staring mournfully at the camera (and therefore at us, the viewer) it is an understandable human reaction to think that something should be done, that that gaze requires some action from our side (Chouliaraki 2013). On the contrary, the kind of images that depict refugees as masses, that privilege groups of adult man over innocent children are much more likely to leave us uncertain about what should be expected from us as a reaction. As much as images of babies looking us in the eye can trigger an emotional response of empathy (Manzo 2008), images of overcrowded boats or masses of indistinguishable faces may arouse various degrees of discomfort, apprehension and fear (Bleiker et al. 2013). But the securitization goes also behind the emotional sphere. At the political level, the visual narrative of the threatening refugee contributes to reinforce a discourse on refugees that tends to depoliticize the causes of displacement and the agency of people on the move. In this simplified account, the refugee situation is presented as a question of safety, order, management and control, ultimately a question of security.

This chapter explores the different aesthetic patterns through which transnational humanitarian NGOs have contributed to a securitized representation of refugees, one in which people on the move are depicted as threat. Through analysis of five different visual themes – vectors without goal, visual rhetoric of emergency, iconography of migrants’ boats, the use of conceptual structures and the visual construction of the ‘other’ – this chapter will show how relief agencies have depicted refugees in terms of menace.

2 Visual Threats

2.1 Vectors Without Goal (Fig. 5.1)

This picture has been published as ‘photo of the week’ on MFS’s website. The image represents a long line of people with backpacks and bags walking, all in the same direction, through a rural area. In the language of visual social semiotics, the “visual syntactic pattern”’ (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001) of this picture is a narrative one. Its participants are represented in the process of doing something, there is an action going on (as opposed to the conceptual structure that shows the subjects in their essence, with no reference to a particular time and space). People’s faces are not identifiable and the group at first glance seems mostly composed by men. Looking more closely we may discern a few children. However, individual details are not very relevant here since the subject of the photos – what is visual social semiotic, is called the “represented participant” of the image – is clearly the group of refugees. The effect is conveyed by portraying the subjects as fused in one line, with no separate distinctive characters. The hint about these people being refugees is given by the presence of luggage that functions as an index of their displacement.

Fig. 5.1

©Alessandro Penso/MSF

The background of this image is also given importance because of its relative salience.¹ The lines of the trees, the grass, the mountains, and the clouds do not appear as a distant setting but constitute lines running parallel to the one made of refugees. This clearly visible and salient setting situates the action in a rural field, familiar scenery, a generic landscape to be found in many parts of Europe. Although the shape of the natural element elegantly accompanies the shape of the long line of refugees, this last element stands out in the image as the most salient and relevant. Not only is it the only not-natural element in the composition, but also the group of people presents a higher color contrast compared to the rest of the rather softer, almost pastel, colors of the landscape.

What I find most interesting in this picture lies in its narrative structure. Drawing on the literature that has gone behind the idea that the visual structure is a representation of reality, or that which has described it only in formalistic terms, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) have highlighted the importance of the visual structure in meaning production. Visual structures are ideological as the syntax of the picture contributes to the constitution of a representation of reality that is connected with the social environment within which the images are created. Narrative structures, as opposed to conceptual structures, contain vectors that are the visual proposition of the image syntax (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). For this reason, it is crucial to explore the narrative structure of this picture and to keep in mind its extremely important semantic aspect.

The action of the image is constituted by the vector, the line that connects all participants in one line. Refugees are moving as a mass and with a strong directionality. Usually, the actors of the image are the ones from which the vector generates. In this particular case, the refugees are the actor of the action and the action at the same time. Most importantly, there is no goal for the action. In the language of social semiotics this is a unidirectional non-transactional action, a process going in one specific direction that does not point at something in particular (either an actor or a goal). The absence of the goals is all the more relevant if its visual effect is combined with the strong directionality of the action given by the dark line of people walking through the territory. As Andersson has pointed out, talking about the visuality of migration securitization, “risk is made real through a world of arrows” (Andersson 2012, 9). The art theorist Rudolf Arnheim defines the represented participants in terms of “masses” or “volumes” with a” weight” and” gravitational pull”. The vectors – that, as we have seen, represent processes – are also conceptualized as “tensions” and” dynamic forces” (Arnheim 1956, 1982). If we re-read the picture using the vocabulary of Arnheim, who was writing about visual perception, the meaning of a strong vectoriality without a goal may appear clearer. What the narrative structure of the picture is suggesting is that there is a mass and a tension in the direction of a familiar and quiet landscape.

This vectoriality without a goal is one of the ways through which the depiction of refugees contributes to their being represented as threat: a salient arrow with no goals, and therefore no explicit objective of the action, launched into (our) peaceful and ordered territory.

This is one way to look at it. Since images are inherently polysemic for they obviously lend themselves to various readings and interpretations. For example, someone could be struck by a feeling of strangeness, given by the abnormality of such a walk, clearly not a Sunday stroll, a group of people moving through fields with children and rucksacks. At the same time, the strong vectoriality of the picture could also be read in terms of strength, as a symbol of people on the move, with strength and necessity to move. However, in a visual social semiotic perspective, the suggested meaning of an image is based on the combination of different layers of meaning which, combined, work to reinforce (when they underline different dimensions of the same narrative) or weaken (when they blend different or even antithetic accounts) a particular reading. In this sense, as discussed in a more detailed way in Chap. 3, reading a picture in a certain way is not just an arbitrary and personal interpretation. Rather, it is the consideration of the combination of the various levels of meaning of an image, seen in a precise geographical and historical context – in this case that of the European ‘refugee crisis’ and the mainstream media and political securitized account around it.

Vectoriality with no goal is not the only pictorial element contributing to the social imaginary of the refugees as threatening. The lack of eye contact with the represented participants makes this picture an ‘offer’ image. In this case, it offers information on what is happening in the Greek islands during the period of the so-called migration crisis. There is no establishment of direct contact between the viewer and the people portrayed in the image. The effect of distance is accentuated by two other photographic techniques (or semiotic resources in the language of visual social semiotics): the very long shot and the oblique angle. What all these elements do is to underly the social distance between the producer of the image (and the viewer) and the refugees. Distance between the audience – ‘we’ – and represented participants – ‘they’– is kept at its maximum potential. Because of the importance of the we versus they narrative, a part of this chapter (see section The Other) is dedicated to the specific exploration of this dimension. What is important here is that the combination of different meanings included in the polysemic representation of the picture contributes to the representation of the refugees as a mass of people that, distinct and distant from us, has, nonetheless, a strong dynamic tension while we observe the group penetrating into our landscape.

Among the more than a thousand images collected for this study, this picture is not the only one displaying this specific narrative structure. The visual theme that I am calling vectoriality with no goal is present in at least other two dozen images, each of them in its distinctive way. While it is clearly not a dominant depiction of refugees in NGOs visual production, it is, nonetheless, present (especially in the visual production of CARE and MSF) and contributes to the reproduction of an account of refugees as threat.

There is little doubt that the intention of the image producer of these different, and yet sharing a “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein 1953) images had another goal in mind. Interviews with NGOs humanitarian and communication officers in the field showed that there are a variety of reasons behind their ‘offer images’. In most cases the NGOs message focuses on information about the situation, their work on the ground and possibly the mobilization of emotional, civic, or monetary resources. In the case of the pictures above, the immediate accompanying text can be a useful indication of the kind of message that the organization had in mind. The short description complementing the picture briefly tells about the organization’s work at the Greek-(North) Macedonian border and the situation that refugees are facing along the route (MSF 2015). The other pictures of this kind analyzed in the study were either accompanied by NGO statements against the closure of borders and protests against European migration policies² or part of photo-journalistic projects aimed at showing different dimensions of the migration paths (Save the Children 2016; Oxfam 2016b). However, the element of protest, or of the threats refugees are exposed to during their journey, are completely missing at the visual level from the pictures examined.

Of course, a single image cannot contain an infinite number of elements. This is an essential feature of the photographic genre: the framing choice influences what is present and what is absent.

In this arbitrary choice lies its power, a power made even more effective by photography’s strong epistemological claim of representing reality (Kuhn 2013; Sontag 1973; Barthes 1981). What is critical in the discussion around vectoriality with no goal and its securitization potential is that in the all the similar pictures considered the element of protest, indignation, complexity of the situation are not visible. In a CARE picture in which the refugees in line are covered with heavy blankets which constitute the only visual hints about the ‘uncomfortable’ situation people are going through. At most, they function as an index of a cold, harsh climate, a lack of proper shelter, but the image adds little to the political and everyday conditions that Syrian refugees are faced by along their route and that is, instead, present and given relevance in the text accompanying the image. This is quite at odds with the widespread assumption that one image is worth 1000 words (Stocchetti and Kukkonen 2011). It is clear that one of the features for which NGOs use visual material is for its ontological “immediacy” (Hansen 2011). In talking about the relation between photography and the organizational mandate of bearing witness, the director of operational Support of MSF Athens Unit, affirmed: “We do speak out after bearing witness (not because we hear things in bars), but after we have seen things. If you can accompany what you are saying with a pic is much more powerful and sometimes you do not even need to comment on a picture that speaks for itself.”³

Despite the acknowledged importance given to the visual level from NGOs, there is a clear disconnection between the visual and the verbal representation of the long lines of Syrian people on the move. This disconnect is not something new in the account of situation of crisis. Campbell (2007) has shown how (textual) media accounts of the Darfur conflict have revolved around two dominant themes: genocide and humanitarian crisis. At the visual level, the political dynamics and implications of the Darfur genocide were either diluted in a simplistic and inaccurate representation of the systematic use of violence in an ‘ancient’ and ‘ethnic’ conflict (ibid., 377), or completely obscured by the humanitarian crisis interpretation. One can recognize a similar dynamic in the vectoriality with no goal pictures. While the arguments of indignation, protest and need to act are strong and clear in the text, they are completely absent from the visual representation. As we have seen, the social distance put between the image producer and the people portrayed along with the intense directionality of the images’ vectors pointing at nothing specific – if not pointing directly at the spectator – instead of underlying the humanitarian message, seems to undermine it. By only looking at the pictures, the representation of refugees resonates more with the media accounts of masses invading our space (Falk 2010), than with the reality of refugees stranded at borders on their way to escape conflict and its consequences.

2.2 The Rhetoric of Emergency (Fig. 5.2)

A mass of people, no faces, at night. It is the ultimate refugee emergency. This picture, published in October 2015, depicts a large group of people with no individual traits. In the lower left-hand corner there is a boy turning towards the viewer. Probably, he is looking at us, but his face is backlit, his gaze thus blocked. There is nothing going on, no action but only a mass of people on a dark night, lit only by a couple of lampposts. We can just guess that they are many. The weight of the mass is made heavy from the lighting from above and its position at the bottom of the image (Arnheim 1956). The lack of an action going on, or a vector pointing in some direction, reveals, by default, the “conceptual” structure of the image (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). Here the represented participants are portrayed “in terms of their more generalized and more or less stable and timeless essence, in terms of class, or structure or meaning’ (ibid., 79). More specifically, the mass of refugee is represented in its suggestive symbolic process. It eludes an analytical interpretation because of the impossibility of discerning individual features. Details are overlooked in favor of an “atmosphere” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 106) underlined by the extreme dark lighting and the blend of different colors in different tonalities of brown. The de-emphasization of distinguishing characteristics and colors accentuates the symbolic value of the carrier – the mass of refugees – in its generic essence. The suggestive symbolic process of this image represents the participants as if their identity and meaning were originating from within them: a mass of people embodying the refugee emergency. The medium range shot, the back view and the lack of eye contact with any of the participants accentuate the social distance of the image producer and the viewer from the represented participants. The Facebook post accompanying the picture focuses on the difficult living condition of people on the move and the limited (open) routes available to them (CARE 2015). Once, again the information included at the textual level is not present at the visual level, where the theme of the emergency prevails.

Fig. 5.2

©CARE, Facebook Syria Response October 2015

While extremely recurrent in the media representation, the iconography of refugee emergency is not a predominant visual pattern in NGOs visual material, especially if we exclude boat pictures that constitute a specific visual theme (to which the following section is dedicated). More precisely, the iconography of emergency is a recurrent visual trope in NGOs representation of refugees in general and Syrian refugees in particular. But there are two different kinds of representation of the emergency that have distinctive visual patterns and are conceptually different. In a study on the manufacturing of the emergency by the Italian government following the arrival on the island of Lampedusa of around 30,000 Tunisians in 2011, Campesi (2011) identifies two different discursive regimes employed by the national authorities: the “securitarian emergency” on the one hand, and the “humanitarian emergency” on the other. While the former stresses the security aspect of refugee arrivals, the latter refers to the concept of human security. At the visual level, NGOs’ representation of the Syrian refugee ‘emergency’ presents a similar dichotomy. In one case people on the move are depicted as threatening, in the other as referent objects of a threat.

Although clearly two sides of the same coin, I find both representations problematic but for different reasons and with distinct intrinsic dynamics. It is also important to notice that the largest portion of pictures portraying the situation of emergency are images of the Syrian war and its destruction. They therefore represent an idea of emergency based on the human security concept, not the one discussed in this chapter, but an emergency that is threatening people and causing their suffering and displacement (see Chap. 5 for analysis of NGOs representation of refugees as referent objects). Here, I am only focusing on the photos that frame the refugees’ movements of 2015 and 2016 in terms of what Campesi has defined “securitarian emergency” and thereby contribute to their representation as threatening. These kinds of images, albeit not predominant, are at the same time not completely absent from aid organizations’ visual narrative. While they are marginal in CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children aesthetic representations, they are slightly more common in that of MSF. This may have to do with MSF’s emphasis on witnessing and speaking out to alert the public to abuses occurring beyond the headlines or to criticise the inadequacies of the aid system. However, also when intended to bolster or legitimise denunciation these images simultaneously contribute to reproduce an account of refugee movements in terms of urgency and emergency.

The concept of refugee emergency, so strongly connected with the so-called migration crisis between 2015 and 2016, is based on the idea of the exceptionality of the situation combined with the intensity of the phenomenon. The rhetoric of the refugee emergency as threat illustrates an extra-ordinary mass of people arriving in Europe. Particularly important in this perspective is the temporality of emergency that becomes a justifying argument for the state of exception (Agamben 2005). By reproducing this particular kind of emergency narrative, NGOs contribute to the constitution of a specific “social imaginary” (Calhoun 2010) of refugees that not only shapes our understanding of the phenomenon but also the action following that interpretation. The problem with this approach is that an emergency situation refers to what is going on without bringing into question its specific circumstances, causes and consequences (Calhoun 2010). This is problematic because “in contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time” (Sontag 1973, 18). On the contrary, the rhetoric of the refugee emergency focuses on the here and now, concealing and preventing a more complex understanding, and reinforcing a securitization framework in which an extraordinary situation needs extraordinary measures that go beyond the ordinary political sphere (Buzan et al. 1998).

The emergency refers to something unexpected. The ontological unpredictability of the emergency takes everybody by surprise. Calhoun (2010) has shown how this widespread feeling of unpredictability is especially reinforced by the media. Whereas more complex analysis may appear in print, news, and TV news in particular, represent emergencies as springing from a vacuum. On this point, it is quite clear that the logic of NGOs visual representation works in a different way. As we have noticed before, photos of the level of violence and devastation in Syria and the difficult conditions of refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Greece and further north along the Balkan route constitute the large bulk of NGOs visual production. However, although NGOs visual representation does not conceal the causes producing the crisis, it generally fails to connect them with the resulting ‘emergency’ at the visual level. Aid organizations’ visual material is compartmentalized as is its practical functioning with different field operations responding to different ‘emergencies’: whether it is winter in Lebanon, perilous landings on Greek shores or being stranded in Serbia. As a humanitarian worker I interviewed in Greece affirmed: “here in Greece the mission of Save the Children is not too big. We are only responding to the refugee crisis. There are no projects on integration, or more development programmes like in other countries. When the crisis will be over, we will be probably pulling out…or at least I believe so. There was no Save the Children Office in Greece before”.⁴

At the visual level, this aspect is particularly evident if we look at the compositional meaning. We may take Save the children’s website at the time of the refugee ‘crisis’ as an example, although similar considerations have emerged from analysis of the websites of all the other three organizations. First of all, there is no link to a page devoted to the war in Syria and its consequences for Syrian people in the country and abroad. The user is left to navigate the site either by topic in the section ‘what we do’ (in this case a list of the NGOs’ sectors of intervention), by news, or by country in the ‘where we work’ drop down menu. Clicking on the ‘read more’ button on the homepage opens an article on children besieged in Syria. There are no links or visual connection with the refugees in Europe or in neighboring countries. Navigation through the Syria-dedicated page offers a similar pattern. There is no link, literally and conceptually speaking, between what is going on in Syria and the refugees’ displacement.

In the opposite way, but with the same result, the photographic essay devoted to Children on the Move in Europe first published in September 2015 and last updated in July 2016 (Save the Children 2015) does connect what is happening in Syria with the situation of displacement, mentioning, through photos and text, conditions in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Serbia and elsewhere. Yet, this essay includes refugees from Afghanistan, Egypt and Somalia, putting all children on the move in the same frying pan, as if their specific contexts and reason for displacement did not matter. The result is somehow similar to what Nyers (1999) has noted regarding the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) website. The page devoted to showing What it is like to be a refugee? gathers pictures of different displacement situations, including Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Tajikistan and Vietnam. The different photos portray the distinct dynamics and complexities of each of these refugee movements. Yet, they are gathered together because of the shared experience of refugeeness. This “universalist, humanitarian perspective”’ (Nyers 1999, 16), visually symbolized by the cover image of an empty shirt hanging to dry outside an emergency shelter, suggests that all different displaced people are unified by the same feeling of lack, of emptiness instilled by the empty shirt hanging over without a body inside. Such visual compartmentalization creates a disconnection between the causes of suffering and displacement and their consequences. They are represented as suddenly and surprisingly happening, or, on the contrary, the conceptualization of refugeeness in its depoliticized and timeless emergency essence.

All this is completely ad odds with the comprehensive knowledge of the Syrian situation that NGOs should have presented, given their large operations in Syria’s neighbors (all four NGOs also work inside Syria) and in Europe for at least the previous two years. This compartmentalization is also in conflict with the role that NGOs have in the management of complex emergencies (Dillon and Reid 2000; Duffield 1994). UNHCR defines complex emergency as large scale events, intensified by armed conflict (internal or international) causing serious human rights violations and large scale suffering for the civilian population, producing large scale displacements (Ogata 1993). Most NGOs interpret their mandate to address ‘root causes’ and protect rights in a holistic manner typical of the rights-based approach. However, at the visual level, this is not represented at all. The response is compartmentalized, and the different situations result in disconnected reproducing of the ‘social imaginary’ of emergency as unpredictable and disjointed from its complex net of causes. Such emergency representation has important implications when it comes to its relationship with human rights and their individual/collective dimension. The depiction of displaced people in terms of invisibility and acorporeality erases any individual trait and makes it difficult to think in terms of political and social rights for a collective and indistinct group (Nyers 1999).

Another aspect of the concept of emergency, and the refugee emergency in particular, is its representation as an exception to a given order, an assumption that the disorder is caused by local factors (Dillon and Reid 2000). In the forward to The State of The World’s Refugees 1993: The Challenge of Protection, Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, affirms: “The subject of refugees and displaced people is high on the list of international concerns today not only because of its humanitarian significance, but also because of its impact on peace, security and stability. The world cannot reach a new order without effectively addressing the problem of human displacement” (Ogata 1993, 2).

There are numerous different understandings of ‘order’ in which global displacement represents disorder and exception: a matter of citizenship as the “authentic ethico-political identity” (Nyers 1999, 3), that which eludes “a predictable system of relations and flows’ (Calhoun 2004). While order is associated with development, disorder is associated with underdevelopment (Duffield 2001). Images of masses of people visually represent this exception to the normal flow of things and ordinary people’s movement. Against this background, NGOs become key actors of containment and management of such disorder. At the visual level, this representation is reinforced and reproduced by the disorder of the masses or the need to ‘manage’ them. What these pictures fail to represent is that refugees, far from being the exception to an allegedly stable international order, are, rather, part and parcel of a “world-systemic phenomenon” and even more, of the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995). As Malkki has pointed out, this essentialized representation of refugees as a mass of displaced person sharing the refugee experience as a group reinforces the vision of the nation state as the “natural or necessary order of things” (ibid., 511). She argued that this mutually constitutive relation between a functionalist and essentialist representation of refugees and the assumption that state sovereignty is the order have two important consequences. It not only naturalizes closed border policies but also the need to ‘manage’ refugees who are ‘out of place’. The idea of emergency and disorder is threatening because it produces instability in an otherwise supposedly stable situation. In this representation of the emergency, refugees are the disorder, refugees are the threat.

Of course, NGO framing of Syrian refugees’ arrivals in Europe in terms of emergency can also be looked at within a logic of economy of attention. Many commentators have explained how NGOs in the contemporary news production landscape compete within this economy (Friese 2017; Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; DeChaine 2002; Cottle and Nolan 2007; Nolan and Mikami 2013; Dijkzeul and Moke 2005). However, although this representation may prove effective for drawing public attention, raising awareness, and mobilizing resources for solidarity interventions, it remains intrinsically problematic. In competing for attention, it reveals the exceptionality of the situation, the need of emergency measures (Friese 2017), thereby reinforcing and reproducing a securitized image of people’s movements.

At the theoretical level, the compartmentalization of several different emergencies, very much in line with the structures through which NGOs operate in the field, and the representation of refugees as anomalies to be managed, seems to perfectly fit within the Copenhagen School’s conceptualization of securitization. Its framework is, indeed, based on the theoretical assumption of the exceptionality of security politics (Huysmans 1998) – in this case emergency interventions for situations that escape ordinary political management. In including humanitarian agencies in the realm of potential securitizing actors, Watson has also suggested seeing securitization as a continuum on “a spectrum of exceptional/institutionalized” (Watson 2011, 8). Such approaches seem to miss something crucial about securitization and the production and reproduction of emergencies. As the Paris School – a post-modernist approach to security studies inspired by Michel Foucaut and Pierre Bourdieu – and Didier Bigo in particular, have perceptively shown, this perspective fails to address the issues linked with the “effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional”’ (Bigo 2002, 73). Although the Copenhagen School obviously does not agree with the assimilation of migration with security, as Bigo notices, they “accept the ‘truth’ about what security is not in the way they agree with the military (Waever in particular is critical of the existential character of the threat), but do so by accepting the framing of a different domain of security beyond the political—one linked with emergency and exception (Bigo 2002, 73). The way NGOs visually represent emergency works with a similar logic, where the narrative of emergency fuels a securitization discourse. Both are presented in terms of exceptionality.

Overall, the representation of the arrivals of Syrian refugees in Europe as an emergency has several negative implications. It overestimates the impact of Syrians seeking refuge in the West while at the same time neglecting the magnitude of displacement within Syria and in the Middle East. It overlooks the causes of Syrian people’s movements from their homeland and onwards from neighboring countries. It leaves politics and economy out of the equation. It neglects the role that Europe and the USA has played (or avoided playing) in the unfolding tragedy of the Syrian uprising. It paves the way for emergency solutions that are by definition short-term and aimed at the immediate management of the disorder. I find the presence of pictures of this kind – even though residual – surprising for two main reasons. The first is linked with the intention, expressed by a few of my informants, that one of objective of their NGO’s communication was to challenge the stereotypes around the refugee issue by showing the humanity of displaced people. Pictures like the one discussed above seem to go in the exact opposite direction, since the visual rhetoric of emergency resonates more with sensationalist media headlines about refugee ‘emergency’ and ‘crisis’ dimension of refugees’ movement, rather than its individual and human experience. The second reason is related to the fact that all images visually representing the refugee emergency were depicting refugees in Europe. No such images were used to represent Syrians crossing borders into Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey, thus obscuring the reality that in September 2016 they were hosting nearly five times the number of Syrians as those who had reached Europe (Migration Policy Centre 2016). During interviews, informants often underlined how Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey were bearing the brunt of the burden of Syria’s exodus⁵ and how European countries needed to do their fair share in terms of asylum⁶ and resettlement.⁷ However, this important message has been visually completely overlooked. The result of the representation of Syrian arrivals in Europe in terms of emergency has the effect of securitizing the refugee issue. The problem is that this representation “is not merely a description of the world, more or less accurate, but an abstraction that plays an active role in constituting reality itself” (C. Calhoun 2004, 391).

2.3 Boats, Refugees at Sea, and Rubber Dinghies (Fig. 5.3)

In the social imaginary of emergency, the iconography of boat and so-called boat people⁸ is particularly recurrent and relevant. Pictures of people on rubber dinghies became quite common between 2015 and 2016, illustrative of the journey undertaken by many people on the move, and specifically Syrian refugees. At the end of 2016 Syrians still constituted the greatest proportion of those landing on European shores, one fourth of the total, but the number drastically decreased from 524,597 people between January 2015 and January 2016 to 81,949 at the end of 2016 (UNHCR 2016). The drop in the numbers is largely explained by the coming into force of the EU-Turkey Agreement signed in March 2016 which, as noted, effectively closed the Balkan route into Europe.

Fig. 5.3

©Save the children/Anna Pantelia

A picture published by Oxfam on Facebook in 2016 (Oxfam 2016c) shows a small rubber dinghy overcrowded with people and two humanitarians recognizable by their high-vis jackets. Although we can identify heads, refugees are fused together in an intricate bundle of bodies, while their ‘saviors’ stand out. As with pictures examined above, refugees are presented as an undistinguishable group. We can neither see their faces nor facial expressions. Some orange life jackets stand out as symbols of the perilous journey these refugees have had to undertake on the sea leg of the Balkan route. A few black lifebuoys float in the background, symbol of rescue. The setting of the image helps us to situate the scene in time and space. It is twilight in what is for Europeans a familiar Mediterranean seascape. There is an action going on: the vessel is arriving, its passengers poised to disembark. The vector points toward the shoulders of the viewer. At first it may seem that the boat tends toward the rescuer, but closer inspection shows that he is moving toward the side of the boat, probably where his colleague is standing. Delving deeper, we can spot a rope on which the person in front of the dinghy is leaning, in the act of pulling. The visual non-transactive action can be translated as ‘refugees arriving on (our) coasts. The visual emphasis on the humanitarian staff draws attention to an embedded process of rescue. Although the two people with high-vis jackets are not doing anything specific, it is quite clear that they are part of the solidarity effort, either volunteers or professional, engaged in providing ‘emergency’ care, NGO bodies on the ground. The lack of eye contact and the frame size connote this photo as an offer image. While providing us with the visual information about what it is going on, the medium range shot puts a certain distance between the represented participants and the viewer (us). However, this sense of distance is contrasted by the frontal angle and the directionality of the vector that keep us engaged, at least to a certain extent, to the image. Along the “close personal distance” – “far social distance” continuum identified by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) this image situates us at a relatively close social distance. What the combination of these semiotic resources suggests is that groups of refugees are arriving toward us and that this is something that implicates us in one way or the other, whether we like it or not.

The words ‘THIS IS NOT ABOUT REFUGEES. THIS IS ABOUT PEOPLE.’ superimposed in caps on the picture is given explicit saliency. The meaning of the caption (and the intended message of its image producer) seems clear: there may be questions about the legality of their movement, but this is a question of humanity. The caption strikes me as problematic for various reasons. Firstly, it is linked with adversative construction of the period. Why is the notion of people opposed to that of refugees? What is inherently good about the former group that is, on the contrary, bad about the latter? One would guess that the message’s intention is to desecuritize the refugee issue, intended following Huysmans (1995), to be a narrative that tries to convince that migrants are not a security threat. An Oxfam policy advisor told me that their “focus is on human rights and people issues. We do not talk about security issues at all. On the contrary, our job is to remove the security argument form the equation’.⁹ Although she was not referring specifically to the representation of ‘boat’s people’, this was the answer to my question on how the organization was dealing with questions of security around the refugee issue and its accommodation with the humanitarian message in its advocacy strategy. Despite the stress on the idea of shared humanity – the rhetoric of the ‘we are all human after all’ can be interpreted as a sincere ‘objective desecuritization’ effort which plays on victimhood and solidarity. Its meaning remains, I believe, quite problematic. By trying to convince us that refugees are not a security threat, this narrative reproduces the native/refugee dichotomy and in this way (re)securitizes the refugees. But what it is even more important is that the text appears at striking odds with the ideological value of the image. The indistinctiveness of the group of refugees on the dinghy works exactly in the opposite direction, taking away individuality and humanity from the people represented.

The picture above is clearly not the only one of its kind. Between 2015 and 2016, images of boats have been particularly present in MSF visual material and, to a much lesser extent, in Oxfam and Save the Children. CARE seems not to have published a single image of migrants’ boats during the observed period. It is not a surprising finding that this visual theme is more present in MSF communication, since the NGOs has explicitly decided to capitalize on media and public attention on maritime SAR operations to draw public attention to the Mediterranean border regime (Cuttitta 2017). The absence of images of boats in CARE’s visual material, and the limited number in Save the Children photos, seems to be mostly linked to their attempt to avoid direct implication in highly politicized debates. This would explain a similar attitude despite the two NGOs’ respective absence (CARE) and presence (Save the Children) in the waters of the Mediterranean. With the same logic, but opposite result, the presence of such kinds of pictures in Oxfam’s communication – even though the NGO has not worked in SAR – can be explained by the agency’s attitude of considering political confrontation an option when the topic is linked to human rights.

In recent decades the iconography of overcrowded boats has become a symbol of large migration flows and a visual trope quite familiar to Western audiences. They have included Vietnamese adrift in the South China Sea after the victory of the Vietcong in 1975,, Albanians disembarking in Brindisi in 1991, boatloads of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia, Cubans crossing to Florida, Somalis in the Gulf of Aden trying to reach Saudi Arabia Africans crossing the Straits of Gibraltar en route to Spain and, most recently, refugees at peril crossing the English Channel.. Images of overloaded boats become symbolic to such a point that a famous Italian fashion photographer used one of these images for a commercial campaign.¹⁰ In the media (Falk 2010; Friese 2017; Hermanin 2017) and in political accounts (Andersson 2012; Gale 2004) images of cramped vessels very often serve as visual background for discourses on irregular migrations, and invasion.

In order to better grasp the meaning of such widespread use of images of overcrowded boats in the public debate on people on the move, it is important to consider the strong ideological value attached to this iconology. Vessels full of people inspire feelings of threat and fear (Pugh 2004; Falk 2010; Bleiker et al. 2013; Musarò 2017; Friese 2017; Furedi 2005; Massumi 1993). In a content analysis of Australian media representation of asylum seekers, Bleiker et al. (2013) have observed how the large majority of pictures privileged medium/far range shots where refugees were represented as indistinct groups and how the recurrent presence of a (distant) boat in many images reinforced this visual pattern of emotional distance. The semiotic resources at play in those pictures, exactly as in our case, were framing the issue in terms of threat, thus fueling security discourses.

The consequence of this kind of depiction is that it dehumanizes the represented participants. This point is particularly significant if we go back to the Oxfam dinghy image and its caption. The scope of the verbal message was clearly intended to desecuritize refugee arrivals and bring the issue back to a more human (or also, in this case, humanitarian) ground. However, the need to rescue people at risk of drawing in the Mediterranean and the intended solidarity message end up being diluted. Indeed, the visual and text semiotic signs of the image steer away from this aspirational narrative to actually reinforce and reproduce a dehumanized representation of refugees. The social distance and the dehumanization contribute in fact to a framing of Syrians arriving on European coasts in terms of threat.

On top of the meaningful iconology of the boat, the idea of the ship is linked to its natural environment: the sea. The texture of water, with its fluid, infiltrative power is present in several liquid metaphors on migration. People on the move have been commonly described in terms of floods, waves, and flows (Pugh 2004). This representation, both verbal and visual, resonates not only with the emergency frame discussed above, but also with discourses of infiltration, penetration, and invasion, one of the founding elements of the depiction of refugees as threat.

The interaction between ‘boat people’ and NGOs in the context of the “cosmopolitan space” (Pugh 2004, 51) of the sea, was particularly relevant during the 2015–2016 refugee ‘crisis’. NGOs have been repeatedly accused, particularly by populist politicians in Italy and Spain, of facilitating the work of human smugglers and human traffickers operating in the Mediterranean (Huffington Post 2016; Sea Watch 2016; Financial Times 2016; Liempt 2016). While emergency organizations such as MSF and SCF were engaged in maritime SAR operations to reduce the number of people drowning – 6281 in 2015 and 7932 in 2016 according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM 2017) – they have been the subject of a concerted campaign to criminalize them.

Implicit in the accusation was the assumption that the actions of NGOs were somehow synonymous with those of people smugglers, both facilitating the ‘irregular’ crossing of international borders.

The conception of people on the move as a threat was certainly not part of the narrative of aid organizations as, on the contrary, they sought to rescue those at peril on the sea. However, visually, the iconography of boat people and its strong ideological value has not been particularly challenged by NGO-disseminated imagery consistently presenting an ensemble of semiotic resources very similar to those used by media in the photographic repertoire of ‘boat people’.

At the same time, NGOs representation of people at sea and boats offers visual elements that are not usually present in media accounts. While reproducing and reinforcing a securitized representation of refugees as threat, NGOs also introduce features that slightly differ from the dominant iconology. One innovative element is the presence of ‘rescue people’ among the represented participants. Although medical and security personnel are often portrayed in pictured of disembarkation (see pictures in Friese 2017; and Falk 2010), this mostly happens in close range shots or portraits of ‘victims’ rescued by ‘heroes’. In this case instead, rescue staff are included in medium-far range shots where it is nigh impossible to recognize individual traits. Whether humanitarian operators are recognizable or not, they are usually part of the image’s setting and included as an information element symbolizing the valiant presence of NGOs on the humanitarian front line. They are often accorded prime attention via the saliency of their highly visible yellow jackets or, in the case of the picture above, by being foregrounded. Interestingly, their position between the refugees and the viewer, positions the role of the organization between the people on the move and the spectator and to a certain extent mediates their relationship, inspiring an emotional response completely different from the one evoked by the direct eye contact typical of other kinds of visual themes. However, this does not alter the dehumanization of the refugees on the boat. As Butler has shown, “the ‘frames’ that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum of life) not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject. Subjects are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognized. These normative conditions for the production of the subject produce an historically contingent ontology, such that our very capacity to discern and name the ‘being’ of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition” (Butler 2009, 3–4).

Something similar happens in a Save the Children picture. The classic iconology of the boat crammed with people is challenged by two elements: the subject in the foreground and the point of view. A baby girl in the arms of a woman, possibly her mother, perhaps a volunteer present at the disembarkation, partially covers the rest of the view. This element attracts our attention because of their centrality in the middle of the frame, the close-range shot – atypical for this visual theme – and the pink color of the baby’s coat in stark contrast with the usually more somber colors of boat pictures. Although this image introduces new elements like childhood, care, and the need for protection (the arm hugging the baby) those portrayed remain unidentifiable. There are no distinguishing traits, no eye contact, no indication in the text of who the baby girl, the woman and the people on the boat in the background are. They are refugees, dehumanized in their timeless essence. As Bleiker, drawing on Malkki, has argued, “we see no faces, no real people. We see just anonymous masses. We see an abstract and dehumanized political problem. Such pictures suppress or overlook the types of factors that make people human” (Bleiker et al. 2013, 411).

Another innovative element of this particular image is given by its interactive meaning. Instead of the lateral or aerial angle, typical of the boat iconology, this pic has been shot with a high angle and a frontal perspective. The boat comes towards us, without interruption, practically on us, strengthening the meanings associated with the vectoriality with no goal discussed above. The high angle puts the viewer in an “imagined position of power” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996) that does not contrast with the interactive distance inspired by the other semiotic resources at play.

It is also important to note that the different articulations of the visual theme of the boat and boat people produced by NGOs introduce another component, one that we could not see in the classic media images: the harbor, the place of refuge, the maternal embrace, the rescuers. What all these different visual clues lead us to think is the presence (or need) of some level of protection. This elusive, but still clearly visible, element is probably more in line with the verbal narrative of aid organizations that work to assist people at sea because they deemed at risk, and not because they constitute the risk.

It is undeniable that boat and emergency pictures alike contain elements evoking, at least partially, the difficult experience of forced displacement. This is clearly one of the intentions of image producers when it comes to NGO’s communication. Showing what is happening, appealing to feelings of shared humanity, challenging stereotypes around refugees, exposing their being at risk, to cite just a few. Referring specifically to the pics of boats and boat people an NGO communication manager told me that the reason they were deployed was because the problem was still ongoing, they needed to inform people what was happening and what the organization was doing as part of SAR activities.¹¹ Many NGO communication and advocacy officers I spoke to indicated that these reasons were fundamental to their dissemination strategy. Of this there can be no doubt. This is not in question.

Nonetheless, aid organizations’ visual representations of boat people and the refugee ‘emergency’ between 2015 and 2016 remain, I believe, problematic. Some humanitarian practitioners acknowledged this when talking about their communications material in general terms. As one communication officer told me: “what is happening in Greece is very bad because NGOs have a lot of power in producing the discourse around refugees, but they are doing a very bad job (…) For example there is an NGO, I will not tell you the name, that recently did an exhibition and it was full of people on boats, very bad conditions. Of course, it could be useful to show the condition of refugees’ arrival but not now. It is not 2015 anymore.¹² Even though she acknowledged the importance of the witnessing role of NGOs and the need to inform the public, she also recognized that this depiction was also contributing to a distorted representation, at least at the moment of our conversation in June 2017 when large-scale arrivals of people on Greek shores were practically over.

However, when the NGOs intention to inform people about the situation is taken into account, the representation continues to be ambiguous. As Cuttitta (2017) has pointed out, the visuality of boats and SAR operations plays an important role in the way NGOs intend to disseminate a ‘correct’ image of migration. These images are important for documenting events and showing donors how their money is being used. Efforts to challenge securitized representations privileging closed-up representation of women and children in need is also evident. However, to some extent, these pictures “end up perpetuating, the neo-colonial image of the ‘good’ Europeans helping the suffering victims of the ‘bad’ smugglers. Thus, they contribute to portraying migrants as individuals in need of help in the first place, rather than as subjects who, in trying to realize their projects, are contesting and defying the political construct of the EU border regime” (Cuttitta 2017, 13).

In short, the images of boat people produced by NGOs during the so-called refugee crisis are not subverting the visual description of refugees arriving on our shores as threatening. The blurred blend of bodies, the indistinctiveness of the represented participants, the ‘vectoriality with no goal’, the frame size, perspective, and point of view, all work together to foster inquietude and fear, reproducing and reinforcing a securitizing discourse that depicts refugees in terms of threat.

2.4 Conceptual Structures (Fig. 5.4)

Throughout the visual analysis of NGOs images, there has been something that kept preoccupying me with regard to aid agencies’ representation of Syrian refugees. It was a feeling inspired by very different pictures, including a portrait of single individuals as much as of groups of refugees. It was not about the subject per se, nor about a particular visual theme or a specific setting. Then I realized: it was something about the use of conceptual representations (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). These kinds of visual structures differ from the narrative ones that are constructed around an action or a process in the making. Conceptual representations formulate the participants in their abstract term, either “in terms of class, structure or meaning” (ibid., 79). I have already discussed this kind of depiction in reference to the mass of refugees often photographed as symbolizing the refugee ‘emergency’. Yet, the significance of the conceptual structure and its use instead of a narrative one can tell us much more. The choice among the two patterns “is important, since the decision to represent something in a narrative or conceptual way provides a key to understanding the discourses which mediate their representation” (Jewitt and Oyama 2001, 141).

Fig. 5.4

©CARE, Facebook Syria Response 29 September 2015

The four organizations rely on this kind of representation to a different extent. CARE uses conceptual structures more than any other NGO. Save the Children and Oxfam also use them extensively but tend to always include a fictitious name and age (with no other substantial details) in the caption in an attempt to enhance the feeling of personal connection. MSF is the organization using these kinds of images to the least extent.

A closer look at the implications of the use of this specific semiotic resource in many and extremely different pictures helps us to understand another way through which NGOs contribute to a representation of refugees as threatening.

CARE’s picture is a very good example of conceptional structure for it combines at least two different kind of conceptual processes. The image is composed by the juxtaposition of two photos. On the left, a black-and-white portrait of a child, a girl, smiling while holding a large box, the provider of which is clearly indicated by the prominent writing at the forefront: CARE, U.S.A. We can clearly induce that the box contains useful assistance items. We also read that the box must be quite heavy, some15 kilograms, a challenge for such a young child to hold. But this is a detail, one which we may assume was a detail also for the image producer. The girl holding the box exemplifies the victims of war receiving assistance from the USA in post-World War II France. On the right, alongside it we have a color portrait of a girl, probably slightly younger, looking at us and smiling while holding a heavy bag whose origin is also quite obvious because of the CARE logo. Again, the bag is heavy, testimony to CARE’s largesse and generosity. It is so heavy that an adult needs to help hold it while the girl poses. Text in the top right corner locates the image in Serbia, in September 2015, during the peak of the refugee ‘crisis’ as Syrian refugees were moving along the Balkan route. The two images differ in tiny details that mostly have to do with the changes of humanitarian (and technical) communication styles over the years: black-and-white versus color, the direction of the girls’ gazes, the apparently accentuated realism of the contemporary image. The differences do not go much further, obscuring the reality that the situation of civilians in post-war France and of displaced Syrians on the move are strikingly different.

What connects the two images is their depiction in terms of a timeless essence of victimhood and humanitarian charity. Two visual social semiotic processes at play here reinforce the conceptual structure of this representation and support the above-mentioned interpretation.

The first one is a ‘classification process’, and more precisely a quite paradigmatic example of what in visual semiotics is known as a ‘covert taxonomy’. In this kind of structure, the represented participants are related “in terms of ‘a kind of’ relation’” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996,79). Their juxtaposition stands for their belonging to an encompassing category. This particular image is a covert taxonomy as the overarching typology is not explicitly visually indicated, although is revealed in the accompanying text: “#CARE has been delivering hope in the form of care packages for 70 years now! From victims of World War 2 to victims of the #Syria crisis, CARE cares” (emphasis added). Not surprisingly, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s description of covert taxonomies seem to exactly describe our image: “One visual characteristic is crucial in the realization of covert taxonomies: the proposed equivalence between the Subordinates is visually realized by a symmetrical composition. The subordinates are placed at equal distance from each other, given the same size and the same orientation towards the horizontal and vertical axes. To realize the stable, timeless nature of the classification, the participants are often shown in a more or less objective, decontextualized way. The background is plain and neutral. Depth is reduced or absent. The angle is frontal and objective. And frequently there are words inside the picture space.” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 79). Moreover, the classification obviously implies an ideological meaning. The classification does not mirror a natural or real relationship. Instead, “it is the structure of the image that naturalizes it. And “naturalization” is not natural, whether in images or in language. The ordering in the image itself produces the relations’.(ibid., 79).

The second process at play is a symbolic attributive process. Such kinds of structures typically include a human subject depicted for what s/he (symbolically) signifies – the carrier – and whose identity is defined in relation with the second element – the symbolic attribute – that stands for the meaning. Symbolic attributes are easily recognizable by specific characteristics identified by art historians such as their saliency, their looking in some way out of place or being typically associated with symbolic value (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). In this picture the girls clearly stand for all victims everywhere, as also indicated in the text. The donation boxes represent the humanitarian assistance, their ‘hope’ in the rhetoric of the text accompanying the photo.

There are other examples of how conceptual structures can be used in very different visual themes: a medium range shot of family in a shelter, the close -up portrait of a veiled woman, an image taken from behind of a little girl walking in a refugee camp, and the portrait of a man with his daughter/niece encaptioned ‘Syria Refugee crisis’. Undoubtably, these images differ from other kind of representations of refugees as threats: represented participants’ faces are mostly recognizable and they look directly at the camera (and therefore at the viewer). However, what all these pictures have in common is the essentialization of the refugee experience into the image. The people represented, although clearly visible and identifiable, are not the subject of the pictures. They are symbols of Syrian displacement.

Although such images are extremely different from the ones typical of the most recurrent threatening visual themes (boats, masses of refugees and vectoriality without goal), the semiotic resources at play here equally contribute to the de-humanization, de-contextualization, and de-politicization of the refugees. The abstractness of the refugee masses here works in a similar way as the abstractness of the individual portrayed. Of course, this shift from the represented participants described as a group of unidentifiable people to the depiction of one individual, a parent with the child or a family, is important and should be acknowledged. It is probably intended to humanize the refuges, giving them a face, a voice, something that we (the viewer) can emotionally relate to. These pictures, extremely common in contemporary humanitarian visual representation of refugees, are intended to bring back the humanity that was lacking in Malkki’s (1996) stereotypical images of a sea of humanity. However, at the same time, the individualities, names, histories, experiences and feelings of the people portrayed are taken away by the photographic selection of a conceptual structure. They stand there as abstract symbols of the overarching category of Syrian refugees. But that it is not all: they also, not surprisingly, represent the exact categories of vulnerabilities of humanitarian work: women and children, families, older people, people with disabilities.

These kinds of images contribute to a representation of the refugees as threatening for two main reasons. On one hand, conceptual structures facilitate an association between the refugee issue and the people depicted to represent it. Noticeably, such people are children, especially girls, women, older people and families. It seems that they can be the poster images of refugeeness precisely because they are not usually threatening characters. On the contrary, they usually are victims, the threatened ones. This is probably one of the reasons why they are chosen by NGOs to embody the entire category: chosen for their being unthreatening. Yet, by coming to symbolize the entire refugee population, they visually completely exclude the adult males who account for at least half of the Syrian displaced.¹³

These representations, therefore, reproduce and reinforce a conceptual dichotomy between the victims, the weak, the threatened and the others. They are the ‘good’ faces, because they are not a threat. But what about the others, the majority of the refugee population? It is not the case that adult Syrian men do not appear in conceptual structure images. This a key point. On the other hand, these pictures become the symbols of the refugees, when we want to talk about the people and not the emergency. The photos have the effect of visually creating a refugee typology that as much as it intends to establish emotional connection can produce the ‘other’. Above all, this is true when the symbolic carriers are represented as aliens, especially when one pays attention to the symbolic attributes present in the images: the woman’ hijab, the man’s headgear, the dirty and muddy environment through which the girl is wandering. All the images using a conceptual structure produce refugee poster images as a category of people different from us. The next section will explore this dimension, discussing the production of self-identity and the other.

2.5 The Other

A Oxfam picture of Moria refugee camp published on Oxfam website in 2016 (Oxfam 2016a)portrays a quite large group of people sleeping or resting on the ground in an open field. Within the mass of people, we can distinguish few faces: in particular a man sleeping in the foreground with his hand on his head, a woman looking aslant at us. We can distinguish few heads as people blend seamlessly with their baggage, sleeping bags and blankets. We have to look carefully to see where one body ends, and another begins. It is a mass of people on the move – but temporarily immobile – and the mass completely fills the frame. The woman’s gaze is at the center of the narrative structure. She is center stage, and salience attributed to her figure by the saturation of her hijab’s color and her position at the top of the prospective triangle formed by the two men’ knees at her side. Despite the presence of eye contact, this is not the ideal type social semiotics considers a ‘demand image’. The perspective, the angle and the distance of the shot, all suggest that this picture is rather an information image. In fact, it offers insights into the situation of refugees recently arrived at Moria. The picture tells us that there are many people, left on the ground in a cold climate and probably waiting for something. The accompanying text completes the information: “In March, as a result of a large increase in people arriving in Moria, the Greek authorities transformed the reception facilities into detention centers. People are now being held pending their mass return to Turkey, following the deal struck between the EU and Turkey. Furthermore, the Macedonian border crossing, where thousands of people had been arriving from Moria Camp to obtain authorization to cross on foot into the former Yugoslav Republic, has been closed. There are now more than 50, 000 refugees currently stranded in Greece” (Oxfam 2016a).

What this picture also does, and it is particularly relevant for the argument here presented, is that it creates enough distance between the represented participants and the viewer to mark a neat line between the refugees, the ‘other’, and ‘us’, the viewer. To a Western audience the hijab immediately evokes something alien, but it is not only this detail marking a distinction between ‘we’ and ‘them’. In the production of an image, the choices regarding the perspective, the angle and the frame size imply the possibility of expressing subjective attitudes towards represented participants, human or otherwise” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 129). Most importantly, “By saying ‘subjective attitudes’, we do not mean that these attitudes are always individual and unique. We will see that they are often socially determined attitudes. But they are always encoded as though they were subjective, individual and unique” (ibid., 129). The picture is taken from an oblique back view that encodes detachment (as opposed to the involvement of the frontal view). Kress and van Leeuwen have pointed out that “the oblique angle says, ‘What you see here is not part of our world; it is their world, something we are not involved with.’ (ibid, 136). In this case, the head of the woman coincides with the perspective’s vanishing points. Her gaze could contrast the feeling of estrangement suggested by the perspective. However, as we have noticed before, her head, and her hijab are precisely one of the exotic symbols that immediately underlines the difference between her and the viewer (see also Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001, 64–96 for a similar analysis). The angle of the picture is not completely at the same level as that of the represented participants but slightly higher, underscoring the viewer’s power in the interactive relationship.

The problem with such kinds of representations is that they reproduce, and reinforce, a binary view that constructs the refugee as the ‘other’ and suggests that as far as we can emotionally relate, their situation is somewhat alien from us. The binary view of ‘us’ looking at ‘them’ implies that the suffering and the difficult condition these people are going through takes place elsewhere (Szörényi 2006) and that the problem is coming from the outside (Calhoun 2004). Of course, this image is not unique in this genre. The visual construction of the ‘other’ is a commonly recurrent theme in the group of images analyzed. Through different combinations of visual social semiotic resources it is present across all four organizations. Although, as I will show in the next chapter, the contemporary preferred humanitarian representation is that of an individual portrayed frontally through a close-up shot and looking straight into the camera, images constructing the ‘other’ through different levels of saliency given to the represented participants, the oblique (or from behind) angle of the picture, the medium-far distance of the shot, and the specific narrative structure, all constitute an important aesthetic pattern of NGOs visual production.

The 2016 Save the Children’s advertising campaign entitled Have we got everything/We’ve got nothing is paradigmatic. All images are built on the dissociation of one represented participant in two different elements. The one on the left, is clearly ‘our’ peaceable, flowless, light-hearted world. On the right, the suffering, disordered and dark world of displaced people. There is no indication that the people depicted on the right are Syrians because it is not the point. No details identify the ones on the left as Italians, Americans or Greeks. What is implied is that on the left there is a general representation of holidays (as typically represented in the Global North) while on the right, a general humanitarian victim situation. Moreover, in the reproduction of these dichotomous categories, the contraposition between what Hall (1996) refers to “belongingness” and “otherness” is fixed and naturalized. The value of this composition is quite meaningful. In visual social semiotics there are three semiotic resources at play in the compositional meaning: information value, salience and framing. The former and the latter are particularly relevant here. The respective position of the elements promotes a specific reading according to their placement in the image. In the Western world, accustomed to left-to-right orientation in reading and writing, the elements on the left side represent the “given”, that on the right, the “new” (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001). Therefore, not only do these images invite us to a binary view of the world, one clearly demarcated between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but also they naturalize ‘our’ and “‘their’ world as something given, unproblematic, ordered as opposed to a new, disordered and emergency world. The framing, in turn, splits the image into two parts, accentuating the dichotomous division and disconnection between two worlds that are presented as not belonging together or potentially having any point of contact.

Obviously, the scope of the organization is not to underline otherness and division but rather to point to the immoral contrast between happiness/unhappiness, having plenty of/being deprived of, peace/war. It is important to consider these images within the context of the NGOs’ communication production, whose scope is to draw attention to the humanitarian situation and mobilize public support. The problem with this is that they also reproduce dichotomic understanding of us/them, normalcy/abnormality that are not contextualized into specific historical and political dynamics. As Bleiker et al. (2014) have pointed out, images exercise a great power in shaping cultures of hospitality. This is even more true in the case of NGOs’ visual representations, that, differently from other kind of representations (media and political discourses for example), certainly have the intention of fostering cultures of welcoming and protection. If we assume, as is fair, that this is probably one of the intentions of these pictures, we should then consider that the representation of the refugee as someone “other” from us, contributes to the production of a discourse of hospitality that is based on distinction, rather than commonalities. This is not problematic because it points out differences among communities, that are of course present and definitively do not need to be hidden. It is rather problematic because it first contrasts with the rhetoric of after all we are all humans utilized by humanitarian communication. Even more, it precisely states the opposite, reproducing and reinforcing power inequalities: clearly, there is a ‘we’ looking at what is happening, required to react to the situation, asked to be in favor of hospitality, and a ‘they’, looked at, waiting for our action and welcoming, naturalized in a subordinate position of power.

What all these pictures have in common is that they catch the unequal relationship that ‘we’ and the ‘others’ have with mobility. As Massey has noted, distinct social groups have different relationships with movement and flows: “some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it” (Massey 2010, 149). Pointing out – and implicitly criticizing – this differential power geometry is probably one of the intentions of the NGO when producing such images. However, beside the implicit condemnation of mobility inequalities, what these pictures do is also to reproduce, and worse, naturalize the representation of dichotomic, (and extremely generic) categories of ‘we’ versus ‘others’. In fact, while surely aiming at eliciting indignation for the inequalities between ‘our’ lucky and peaceful world and ‘their’ unlucky, dystopian and suffering world, these images offer a simplistic account of the situation, where the causes of the suffering are unclear and eventually irrelevant.

The problem is that these kind of depictions accusing “nobody and everybody”’ stimulate a response that is eventually misdirected and unhelpful (Berger 1980, 39). By juxtaposing a ‘normal’ condition of life in the Global North with the emergency situation of the victims of the Global South, this representation fails to admit the protracted nature of many of these emergency situations, how they interrelate with international politics and eventually their systemic presence in world dynamics. The constitution of the category of the ‘other’ has, of course, also the strong potential to define the self as an opposed category. The wealthy homogeneous audience of the Global North, moving around the world for purposes of tourism, is an essentialized group as much as the refugees. It would certainly be interesting when thinking about the construction of the self-identity in NGOs’ visual production. However, this goes behind the scope of this section. What I find more relevant in the analysis of the visual construction of otherness is how this visual pattern contributes to the constitution of the refugee as a threat. The binary representation securitizes the refugee issue by depicting it as a condition of exception to the normality of life. Refugees’ identity is securitized for “successful securitization of an identity involves precisely the capacity to decide on the limits of a given identity, to oppose it to what it is not, to cast this as a relationship of threat or even enmity, and to have this decision and declaration accepted by a relevant group. In the process of dividing between “us” and “them,” the concept of societal security echoes the determination of friends and enemies beneath Schmitt’s concept of the political, and the acceptance of absolute decision in conditions of emergency” (Williams 2003, 520).

3 Conclusion

This chapter has explored the different visual themes used by NGOs that contribute to represent refugees in terms of threat, as threatening. While certainly not the dominant visual pattern in aid organizations’ visual productions, the images that depict displaced Syrians as threat are neither absent from the humanitarian discourse nor so infrequent as to be ignored. This is particularly relevant if one considers that NGOs do not act in a communication vacuum. On the contrary, they are one of the actors able to present a narrative on the refugee issue among other communication actors, notably populist and right-wing political parties and the xenophobic media that sustains them. Since they have quite consistently represented the European refugee ‘crisis’ in terms of the exclusionary rhetoric of othering, politics of fear (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018) and securitization (see among others De Genova 2016; Rheindorf and Wodak 2018), one would expect transnational humanitarian NGOs to produce an alternative message. This has, to some extent, happened to with the relief organizations’ focus on refugees as threatened victims (the subject of the next chapter). Against this backdrop however, the existence of images resonating with mainstream securitized accounts sits uneasily alongside the intention of humanitarian organizations to challenge such a depiction.

The analysis has empirically shown how transnational humanitarian NGOs contribute to a securitized representation of refugees. I have demonstrated how the pictures depicting refugees’ movements through narrative structures of vectoriality with no goal have contributed to the representation of displaced Syrians as a threat, as arrows penetrating ‘our’ tranquil territory. I have also shown how the visual rhetoric of emergency produced by NGOs constitutes the protracted reality of displacement as a disorder to the otherwise normal flow of things that needs to be addressed by extraordinary measures, reproducing and reinforcing a securitized discourse around migration and migration management. By looking specifically at the iconography of the boat, so typical of visual accounting of the 2015–2016 migration ‘crisis’, I have endeavored to document how relief agencies have failed to challenge and completely move away from media and populist political accounts depicting masses of people arriving on European shores. Despite the introduction of innovative visual elements, NGOs’ repertoire on boats and ‘boats people’ has also continued to represent refugees in a dehumanized and, at the same time, incumbent way, liable to arouse feelings of uncertainty, discomfort and fear. Moreover, I have argued that the large use made by NGOs of different kind of images based on conceptual structure contributes to an essentialized representation of the refugees that takes away their individuality and humanity, even when it represents them in close-up portraits that underline their personal features. This depiction also defines refugees as victims and vulnerable people in need of assistance, eventually creating a contrast between the vulnerable victims that have become the poster image of refugeeness and deserving of our support – typically women and children, older people, families, and people with disabilities – and excludes the group of adult men that constitute at least half of the entire refugee population. Finally, I have shown how the depiction of the refugee as someone alien from ‘us’ has the effect of reinforcing a simplistic account of the ‘other’ defined in binary terms as opposed to a generic ‘us’, and, most importantly, as an unexpected exception from an otherwise peaceful world that contributes to the representation of the refugee as a threat to an allegedly ‘normal’ order of things.