The (In)Visibility of Migrants

Abstract

Bruno Catalano’s sculpture Voyageurs brilliantly catches an impalpable, yet pervasive, feature of refugees’ representation: their invisibility. This may seem an oxymoron but throughout my visual analysis, and while looking for what was represented in the images studied, I have been struck by what is not there. Susan Sontag has defined photography as “grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing!” (Sontag 1973, 1). If Sontag is right when she affirms that photography makes things represented worth being seen, we may be led to think that, on the contrary, what is not photographed is not worth seeing. On this arbitrary decision over presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, hinges a very important dimension of the power of photography.

1 Introduction

Bruno Catalano’s sculpture Voyageurs¹ brilliantly catches an impalpable, yet pervasive, feature of refugees’ representation: their invisibility. This may seem an oxymoron but throughout my visual analysis, and while looking for what was represented in the images studied, I have been struck by what is not there. Susan Sontag has defined photography as “grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing!” (Sontag 1973, 1). If Sontag is right when she affirms that photography makes things represented worth being seen, we may be led to think that, on the contrary, what is not photographed is not worth seeing. On this arbitrary decision over presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, hinges a very important dimension of the power of photography.

In this sense, representation is as much about presence as about absence (Manzo 2008). Visual studies have recognized the importance of the unseen (Foster 1988) and the need to conceptualize the absence (Rogoff 2000). A crucial aspect of (in) visibility is its role in social, political and security practices (Ericson and Haggerty 2006). Rancière (2014) has pointed out how systems of meaning function at the visual level, limiting or encouraging thought. Similarly, Bleiker et al. (2013) have argued that by their way of shaping what can (and cannot) be seen, images indirectly shape what can (and cannot) bethought. Even more, images affect the possibility of political positions being adopted, or opinions expressed publicly (Bleiker et al. 2013). Paying attention to Ranciére’s system of visibility – “aesthetic regimes” that decide what should be and should not be visible – allows us to reach a better understanding of refugees’ representation and the relevance of what is left out of the picture.

Invisibility is not only relevant per se, but also for its dialectic relation with visibility. It is by paying attention to what is recurrently present that enables us to identify the significant omissions in how NGOs represent Syrians on the move. In a groundbreaking visual analysis of media coverage of the Darfur conflict, Campbell (2007) observes how the photographic narrative has been consistently built around the humanitarian dimension, while the theme of genocide – that initially inspired journalistic interest and remained an important topic at the textual level – remained systematically absent from the visual representation. In a similar way, exploring what is made visible and what is not in the humanitarian photographic account of the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’, allows us to shed light on how the dialectic between visible and invisible plays out in the representation of Syrian displacement.

(In)visibility is also a particularly interesting lens through which to explore images to highlight their potentiality in terms of emancipation and oppression. On the one side – and as I have already discussed in the previous chapter – there is a wide consensus that invisibility does little good for the victims of violence (Sontag 2003; Kleinman and Kleinman 1996; Butler 2004). Historically, there are cases in which images have brought to public attention dramatic events that were mostly unknown to the general audience. The visual representation of the Biafran famine, along with Western media attention and mobilization that sprang from it, is probably one of the most famous cases in the history of humanitarian photography. From a psychological perspective as well, invisibility can have serious negative implications. Inspired by the publication of a novel on the African American striving for self-affirmation in the 1950s, Franklin (1999) introduced the notion of “Invisibility Syndrome,” This is psychological experience whereby people feel that their identity is consistently undermined by racism and they have to constantly struggle to obtain value and recognition. In these cases, it is quite evident how emancipation passes (also) through visibility. Visual representation of dramatic events of violence or injustice can be ethically very questionable. The picture of the starving Sudanese baby with the vulture that won the Pulitzer prize in 1994 (Carter 1993) is a paradigmatic example of this kind of photo. Kleinman and Kleinman (1996) observed how the long time spent by the photographer waiting for the vulture to fit the frame, instead of doing something to help the child in clear distress, the complete lack of context, and the mysterious absence of the parents suggest how little room for emancipation that image has produced. From a different perspective, the oppressive role of invisibility, and the asymmetrical power relation between the observer and the observed has been masterfully underlined by Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon: a system of surveillance and governance ensured by the total visibility of the dominated subject and the invisibility of the controller (Foucault 1975).

In the specific context of the so-called migration crisis, while boats crowded with people have dominated the media account, the large number of migrants who have died (and continue to die) during the journey has remained mostly invisible (Falk 2010). With the important exception of the dramatically famous photo of Aylan Kurdi, there has been little emphasis on the thousands of migrants who have died along the route.² In Calais, French authorities have adopted a ‘“policy of invisibilisation”, removing migrants from public view to project an image that the migrant ‘issue’ has been solved.” (Slingenberg and Bonneau 2017). These examples powerfully show how absence, and not just presence, requires attention in a visual analysis of how humanitarians account for refugees. With this, I am certainly not arguing that a higher level of visibility of suffering or death would have improved in any way the situation of Syrians on the move. However, an investigation of the visual presence and absence can improve our understanding of the dynamics of NGOs’ representation of Syrian displacement and provide a sense of everything that is left out of n the picture.

From a critical security studies perspective, invisibility is also interestingly connected with the ability of visuality to contribute to securitization discourses. Since visibility works powerfully in the construction of both utterances (Campbell and Shapiro 2007), I argue that so does invisibility. The present chapter addresses four visual themes that are particularly paradigmatic in a discussion about presence and absence in the context of Syrian displacement. It first looks at politics, the big ‘elephant in the room’ of humanitarian discourse, to explore the extent to which politics is reflected in NGOs’ visual materials. Secondly, the chapter explores the (in)visibility of refugees’ protest and contestation in the difficult conditions of protracted displacement. The third section focuses on the (in)visibility of the threats to Syrians on the move, both inside Syria and in the countries of asylum. Finally, the last part investigates the absence of refugees’ voices from humanitarian communication – despite NGOs’ explicit strategic object to ‘make people’s voices heard.’

2 The Impalpable Importance of Invisibility

2.1 The Invisibility of Politics

When I first saw on one of the NGOs’ websites a picture of a girl smiling and making the V for victory sign it made me immediately recall a couple of episodes that occurred during my visits to NGO-run community centers³ in Jordan. In one case, I went to a child-friendly space – places increasingly used in emergency settings to promote child psycho-social wellbeing and strengthen local communities’ capacities in child protection – in Irbid. I was accompanied by the staff of a local NGO and a photographer who was documenting the organization’s work in the field. When we entered the playground, interrupting the activities, a bunch of children ran toward us and a small group started posing for the camera. They were smiling and a couple were making the V sign while the photographer kept shooting pictures of this group of joyful children. The NGO’s team coordinator told the photographer not to use those photos, explaining that for security reasons the organization did not want pictures of children making the V sign as the gesture could be linked to a specific political or conflict-related event in Syria, leaving the children or families exposed, both in Jordan and back home in Syria, for their apparent affiliation with a protagonist to the Syrian conflict. When visiting the field sites of other NGOs in Zaarqa, Maan, and Karak, I was struck by the quantity of Syrian flags – the pre-Baathist version with three red stars adopted by opponents of the Assad regime – in the children’s drawings, affixed to walls and commonly painted on cheeks during face-painting activities. Despite its ubiquity I did not see a single picture containing this flag in the more than a thousand images collected for this study. The invisibility of the national symbol in NGOs’ official photos was motivated by the same security concerns expressed in relation to the V sign.

Though understanding this reluctance, I, nevertheless, find the general absence of political signs and of politics from NGOs’ visual material to be problematic. As Anna Leander has argued, “visibility is most political, when its politics shows least” (Leander 2016, 3). The invisibility of politics in the NGO representation of Syrian displacement is at odds with the importance that the civil conflict has had on people’s lives. However, the invisibility of politics is not at odds with the idea that NGOs have of their work and its relationship with politics. When I probed NGO informants on the connections between humanitarianism and politics and how NGOs managed to accommodate the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality in such highly political contexts, answers were quite clear. One communication officer declared: “our organization does not use ‘political words’. For instance, we do not use the words Daesh, ISIS …we would rather say ‘militant groups’. If a refugee says: ‘my government is killing me’ we will not reproduce it. We cannot take any political stance, it is a statement too strong, too politicized. For example, if I interview a refugee and he talks about ISIS I will have to reduce or change some words and make sure that there is not a strong political statement.”⁴ Another communication and advocacy specialist told me that “everything concerning refugees in Lebanon is about politics. It is no secret that the Syrian army was in Lebanon from 1976 to 2005 and not everybody appreciated this. Politics goes into that whether we like it or not. But we take a human rights perspective, we do not talk about politics. This position is the same with LHIF [Lebanon Humanitarian INGO Forum], Save the Children, Oxfam.”⁵

These testimonies confirm that for NGOs avoidance of political statements is important to preserve their neutrality and impartiality. Political signs, working as visual symbols of political declaration, hinder the perception public opinion has of the organizations as not involved in politics but only interested in the pursuit of their humanitarian goals. I have already explored the debate on the complicated relations that humanitarianism has with politics in Chap. 3. What is relevant here is that politics, symbols and statements, although present both at the visual and discursive level among refugees, are intentionally absent in NGOs’ communication material on the Syrian displacement, lest any dabbling in politics undermine the humanitarian message and intervention.

There is a further fundamental aspect of this invisibility. The absence of political signs in NGOs’ visual representation makes even more sense if considered as part of their intention to challenge media and public accounts of refugees as a threat. Against the complex background of the Syrian civil war and the myriad of actors involved, a depiction of people on the move as completely detached from political affiliations, sympathies, recruitment or support is a way of defying securitized discourses on Syrian refugees. A field-based communication officer told me that for this exact reason they would not photograph armed people close to the hospital where they were working, even though many people arrived armed and the hospital even had a storage area for weapons.⁶ More generally, humanitarian workers, and advocacy staff particularly, were very well aware of the role that their use of politics, particularly when linked with national security concerns in the host countries, could have on the public perception of refugees. As an advocacy specialist for Lebanon Humanitarian INGO Forum (LHIF) affirmed: “some of our members focus a lot on security: for example, on the campaign on education in emergencies. Their narrative comes from the connection to radicalization. The LHIF would not use the reference to the risk of ‘recruitment by armed forces’ as an argument in Lebanon because in Lebanon there is a very strong narrative on the instability of the situation and the military force of the different groups. Such an argument would work against the interests of the Syrians because there is the fear that the government will eventually kick out the Syrian refugees for security reasons. That is why the LHIF would never frame an issue in terms of radicalization, terrorism, and so on. Moreover, we do not want to contribute to the global narrative on security and securitization.”⁷

At the same time, the absence of politics from NGOs’ refugee representation also contributes to a dehistoricized and depoliticized depiction. In a seminal article discussing mass displacement and humanitarian dehistoricization, Malkki (1996) explains how for Hutu refugees talking about their displacement was talking about politics, the politics of the conflict that had led them to seek refuge abroad. But political discussions and political activism could not be encouraged by camp management as they were seen as incompatible with refugee status (Malkki 1996). This dehistoricizing process, she argues, is problematic in so far as it contributes to the creation of the category of universal victim. In the photographic account of Syrian refugees, something similar happens. Although as I have shown, it is a conscious and well-intended move inscribed in NGOs’ protection and counter-securitization strategies, the absence of politics contributes to a dehistoricized and depoliticized depiction of displaced Syrians.

2.2 The Invisibility of Protest

Connected with the absence of political signs, conflict-related symbols and political manifestations is the total invisibility of protest and mobilization among refugees in the way that NGOs communicate. Over the years, and given the often extremely harsh conditions of displacement, Syrians on the move have organized protests, some of which have involved radical acts such as hunger strike and sewing lips together, that have caught the attention of international media (The Independent 2015; Al Jazeera 2015; The Nation 2016). Some of these demonstrations have also had a strong visual expressiveness. More generally, different kind of refugees’ mobilizations occurred within camps and informal settlements in 2015–2016 (Clarke 2017).

However none of this activism or any form of protest, sit-in, gathering, stone throwing or hunger strike is reflected in NGOs’ visual representation. Similarly, there is no visual indication of any kind of individual frustration, resentment or anger that people on the move may have expressed regarding their condition of displacement, hospitality, access to third countries, or humanitarian assistance. This absence of discontent in depiction of refugees’ lives is in line with some NGOs’ communication objectives, not so much to provide information on refugees as to mobilize support for them.

On one hand, the fundamental humanitarian principle of ‘do no harm’ requires staff to be careful not to create further distress through their intervention. Emergency actors are thus very cautious not to fuel social instability and determined to foster social cohesion between different vulnerable communities. As one communications specialist told me: “Our general message is do no harm…of course it is a very slippery slope. For example, recently we have focused a lot on ‘the neighbourhood approach’. It refers to the fact that hosting communities in Lebanon (including Palestinians) are very often in need as much as the refugee communities. Our approach is to work by sector of intervention and not according to specific target communities.”⁸

Against this background, depicting protests organized by the recipients of humanitarian assistance risks depicting them as ungrateful or fuelling the grievances of communities aggrieved l their needs have not been (equally) addressed. One NGO media specialist explained that her team usually ‘prepared’ her agency’s beneficiaries prior to a communication visit. She frankly told me that alongside describing the purpose of the meeting and asking for refugees’ informed consent for the publication of statements, they would try to control the message. When I asked her to elaborate she told me: “if a journalist asks a question on livelihoods that are generating any income.⁹ In that case, if the family is going to curse the government or the UN, we will change family. We want them to speak their minds, but we do not want them to fight with the government. What is really important is protecting the hosting communities. Also, for instance, if someone refers to the social tension problem, we do not want that in writing because it can offend someone, given the generosity of Lebanese society.”¹⁰

The invisibility of protest resonates with the intention of humanitarian NGOs to challenge media and public accounts that present Syrians on the move as a threat. Showing demonstrations, acts of anger or dissent would contribute to reinforcing a securitized media and public discourse that has consistently depicted refugees as a threat. This strategy is in line with two desecuritizing options conceptualized by Wæver: avoiding reproducing a discourse about the issue in security terms and, given that the issue has been already securitized “to keep the responses in forms that do not generate security dilemmas and other vicious spirals” (Wæver 2000, 253). At the same time, the invisibility of protests in NGOs’ visual communication precludes the option of what Huysmas (1995) has defined as a deconstructivist desecuritization strategy: to relocate the issue from the security dimension into the ordinary realm of politics. In this way, the absence in humanitarian depictions of Syrian refugees’ dissent, demonstrations or political mobilization simultaneously contributes to produce multiple effects. These accord with humanitarian organizations’ intention to not fuel a representation of people on the move as threatening, while also precluding their opportunity for ‘making people voices heard.’ The ultimate effect is to represent them as passive victims with limited agency.

An easy, yet erroneous, temptation would be to conclude that the invisibility of politics and protests is implemented as part of a strategy aimed at the protection of the humanitarian subject from securitized accounts, while actually serving the opposite role of silencing their political agency and depoliticizing their cause. What I would like to suggest here is that invisibility produces both meanings at the same time. As Yurchak (2013) has shown, it is neither a question of “official” versus “hidden” discourse nor the enactment of Marxian “false consciousness.” NGOs’ communication is intended for the protection of their beneficiaries from other (more or less vulnerable) communities and negative perceptions on the part of host governments which could put them at risk. While discouraging representation of the values, attitudes and actions of mobile Syrians that would fuel a hostile reaction, they at the same time, conceal any form of the refugees’ political agency. From this eloquent invisibility emerges a passive and depoliticized subject. If the depoliticization of people on the move seems self-evident when they are represented as threat in a securitized discourse that disregards any individuality, personal trajectory, or political context, in this case this happens precisely as a result of NGO discourses designed to counter such an overly securitized account.

2.3 The Invisibility of Threat (Fig. 7.1)

2.3.1 Bombing, Weapons, Tanks, and Soldiers

The figure is part of a larger group of pictures showing the destruction caused by the war. It is the typical picture that visual social semiotics defines as an information image: one that is not establishing any direct contact between the represented participants and the viewer, but where the represented participants – people standing in the middle of buildings in ruins – are rather ‘offered’ to the viewer as “items of information, objects of contemplation, impersonally, as though they were specimens in a display case” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 119). This does not absolutely imply that these kinds of images cannot elicit an emotional reaction. However, when they do so, it is a mechanism based on different premises than in the case in which the represented participants and the viewer are directly connected through the subject’ gaze. The difference lies in the psychological implications of the eye contact between two human beings and the more detached representation with no personal interrelation. In Fig. 7.1, the far distance of the shot and the deep depth of field allows us to observe the extent to which the war in Syria has caused destruction and led to displacement. The level of devastation is underlined by several visual elements: the smoke rising from the ruins – that leaves us wondering whether it is an effect of the recent bombing or something that has been burned to keep people warm – the confusion about the crowd’s direction (since people seem randomly standing or going back to what would seem to be the direction of the convoy), the impossibility of seeing where everybody is trying to go since the picture does not allow for any hope. The sense of disorientation and uncertainty faced by the Syrians represented in the image is also confirmed by the post accompanying the picture: “For the past weeks the people of #Aleppo have suffered so much from the uncertainty of the situation. This must end” (CARE Syria Response 2016).

Fig. 7.1

©CARE, Syria Response 19 December 2016

Despite the power of this image in showing the effect of war, what it is strikingly absent from this shot and all the others sharing the same visual themes of destruction, is the real threat, the perpetrator, the cause of such devastation. In many pictures, we can see the level of destruction and the physical suffering caused by violence and war, but we do not get to see the soldiers, the militia members, the bombs, the tanks, the warplanes that have been the causes of such destruction and suffering. The various kind of images that I consider here include photos with no human element or with people so tucked away in the far background that they are barely noticeable. People are wondering and expressing their affliction by staring at the devastation. There are images of people injured with superimposed text asking for a ceasefire, and other that show people just standing or walking in the middle of the ruins, rescue personnel extracting bodies from the debris. None of those images contains the visual elements referring to the causes of such destruction and suffering.

The real threat to people’s lives remains invisible. This is not only surprisingly absent in the pictures where destruction is shown – as the one above – but even more in those focusing on the victim, the threatened subject that I have discussed in the previous chapter. The perpetrator, as “the victim’s semiotic antibook” (Kurasawa 2015, 16), is never represented, either physically or symbolically. In visual social semiotics, the depiction of actions that only shows the goal, are called events: “something that is happening to someone, but we cannot see who or what makes it happen” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 64). Images in which the prime mover of the action is omitted or made anonymous are very similar, as Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) have pointed out, to the linguistic construction of the passive agent deletion. This linguistic strategy is indeed considered in Critical Discourse Analysis as “ideological transformations”: a grammatical maneuver considered as “containers of potential traces of ideological mystification” (Van Leeuwen 2009, 3). Critical Discourse Analysis has very effectively shown the difference between two different ways of accounting for the same event, based on alternative grammatical constructions. Van Leeuwen uses the example illustrated by Tony Trew in an article that become seminal (Trew cited in Van Leeuwen 2009). In 1975, the police in the white minority regime of Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) shot unarmed people, killing 13 of them. While the Rhodesia Herald led with the headline “A political clash has led to death and injury” the Tanzanian Daily News wrote how “Rhodesia’s white supremacist police…opened fire and killed thirteen unarmed Africans.” The study highlighted how two different political views had been encoded through choices regarding vocabulary and grammatical structure.

The visual absence of bombing, air raids, soldiers or weapons in the representation of devastation, suffering and victimhood works as a visual equivalent of the passive agent deletion. The power of the pictures above, and the many others of this kind, in denouncing the level of destruction, and in showing the kind of visual landscape Syrians on the move are living in when they embark on their migration journey, is therefore seriously undermined by the absence of the actor, the perpetrator. As a visual equivalent of the linguistic strategies that omit certain grammatical elements, these absences cannot only be considered as different stylistic choices, but rather as framings that encode specific political implications.

Although humanitarian NGOs’ primary concern is not necessarily to inform about a situation – as is the case with the media – but, rather, to mobilize support, it is more difficult to attribute to these pictures a conscious omission. The visual absence of a threat has, rather, to be attributed to the NGOs’ intentions to present themselves and their action as neutral and apolitical (as in the case of CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children as discussed in Chap. 4). It is more difficult to explain than in the case of MSF where the importance of calling out perpetrators and taking clear political stances cannot be reconciled with this specific invisibility. However, despite the reasons behind it, the visual absence of the threat contributes to a securitized depiction in so far as it overlooks, when not totally concealing, the causes of Syrian displacement. Also, when looked at through the lenses of the humanitarian perspective – to raise awareness of the plight of refugees and mobilize support – the lack of representation of what is causing people’s suffering and flight fails to defy mainstream accounts in the name of alternative narratives.

2.3.2 Top Protection Issues

During the multi-sited fieldwork, I carried out for this study, I repeatedly asked NGO informants what were their current top advocacy messages. Although some topics would appear as priorities across countries, in each country – Lebanon, Jordan and Greece – the agencies had different sets of key concerns.

In Lebanon, NGO staff very often mentioned the need to target, not just exiled Syrians, but also vulnerable hosting communities (and Palestinian refugees) in the emergency response. This was due to assessments of similar high levels of need among vulnerable Lebanese and Palestinian host communities in addition to increasingly ever more explicit requests from the Lebanese government to include local communities given the rise in social tensions in the country.¹¹ When I asked an Oxfam adviser if the agency would visually present assistance provided to host communities the answer was emphatic: “No, because in any case, we are here to work on the needs and the rights of the most vulnerable”. She elaborated that the point was not to think about the nationality of the beneficiaries but about levels of needs and vulnerability.¹²

Another important topic that often came up during interviews was the ongoing political debate around safe zones following a proposal by the Lebanese Minister for Foreign Affairs to set up refugee camps in areas of Syria that were considered safe, the so-called ‘safe zones’.¹³ On this point, one interviewee told me that “we are trying to develop a counter argument on the mainstream narrative on security zones in Syria. Everybody talks about security zones. Oxfam is saying that there are not safe zones and tries to develop a counter message”. When I asked what the organization’s communication strategy was to accomplish this objective, she answered: “we have done research on the refugees’ perception of displacement and how they see their future. The research highlighted that they want to return but they want a safe return. We want to make their voices heard. We do that through photos, case studies, policy papers. We use a lot of quotes, to bring in the human element.”¹⁴

Another top concern of humanitarian actors in Lebanon was the question of residency permits for Syrian refugees.¹⁵ The question of documentation was, as they explained, crucial, as access to basic services provision such as health care, education, and food distribution hinged on having a valid residency permit. For refugees, obtaining one was extremely difficult and expensive. As the Lebanon Humanitarian INGOs Forum Advocacy and Communication Coordinator explained: “This is a very sensitive issue in Lebanon because the domestic political narrative is all about the fear that refugees will stay in Lebanon and residence is connected with permanency and not temporariness.”¹⁶

Comparing these different priorities with the elements present in the NGOs’ visual material brings out the striking inconsistency between the top humanitarian themes and the ones captured in the photos. Here is no visual reference to the neighborhood approach or to the positive stories countering the social tension narrative. For there is nothing about the safe zones debate. This is especially relevant if one considers that the numerous images showing the level of destruction occurring in Syria discussed in the previous paragraph, they all focus on areas where the territory was highly contested and was not considered potential ‘safe zones’. Similarly, I did not find visual mention of the controversial topic of residence permits and the daily implications for Syrian refugees of lacking valid documentation.

In Jordan, NGO staffers listed an even wider set of humanitarian concerns. Interviewees often mentioned how closure of the Syrian border was affecting the right of people to seek asylum, the medical evacuation of war wounded and worsening the dramatic humanitarian situation of people stuck at the berm (barrier of earth and sand) between Syrian and Jordan. They highlighted how serious human rights violations were happening due to non-respect of the principle of non-refoulement¹⁷ and increasing use of deportation.¹⁸ Regarding the situation of refugees already residing in the country, interviews with humanitarian practitioners confirmed Achilli’s analysis of the Jordanian Government policy of encampment implemented since 2014: “A bleak scenario is playing out against the backdrop of the Jordanian government’s new policies. The encampment policy has affected most Syrian refugees in Jordan at three interrelated levels: it has shrunk the humanitarian space and raised considerable protection concerns; it has increased the number of ITS [Informal Tented Settlement – the default option for refugees to reside in camps or unable to afford housing solutions within host communities] evictions, refugee deportations to camps, and refoulement to Syria; and it has forced refugees into negative coping mechanisms” (Achilli 2015, 6).

Humanitarian informants reported increasing difficulty in accessing the documentation needed to legally reside in urban areas of Jordan and access basic services. An NGO mission head reported that: “The question of valid documentation has become a priority concern. Since 2014, in order to access the Ministry of Interior (MOI) cards that allow the provision of services outside the camps, where 80 per cent of the Syrian refugee population lives, people have to go through a long and expensive bureaucratic process that leaves many unable to obtain the cards, either because they do not meet all the criteria (valid documentation from the camps, written and certified rental agreement, etc.), or because they cannot afford the medical certificates needed for all members of the family. The result is that if you do not have the MOI card you cannot enroll your children in school, access health facilities, receive food or non-food item assistance from UNHCR and other UN agencies.”¹⁹

The photographic account of Syrian refugees in Jordan does not correspond with the set of humanitarian concerns spelled out by NGOs practitioners. Images of people stuck at the berm have rarely appeared in the media, with no mention in visual materials of relief agencies. NGOs have sometimes published statements pointing to the protection concerns arising from closure of the Syrian border, but text has not been accompanied by images. There have been no images of evictions, deportations, forced return to camps, difficulties in obtaining required documentation or limits on access to basic services. Clearly, NGOs have limited space for maneuver to publicly disseminate images of actions that the host government is carrying out in exercising its sovereignty. Nevertheless, the omission is striking, especially considering how some of the NGOs consider themselves champions in human security protection, even if this involves speaking out against states.

Two factors help explain the complete invisibility of key protection issues in Lebanon and Jordan. On the one hand the NGOs (at least in the case of CARE, Save the Children and Oxfam) are keen to present themselves as neutral and apolitical actors, focusing only on what they insist are ‘technical’ humanitarian aspects, such as human rights or provision of services, and eschewing reference to themes with potential political implications. Such a strategy is short-sighted, making it less likely to realise their ‘technical’ goals, and at the same time most likely one of the main reasons of this visual absence. On the other hand, the agencies focus on intense advocacy with the Government on protection concerns. As an MSF staffer reported: “With the political context you have to work taking into consideration that for the benefit of the beneficiaries you can never stand up too strongly because you risk getting the opposite effect. In particular for public communication, we always analyze the benefits and risks, and analyze if we are compromising our or other operations. Often the political context blocks advocacy, public communication and therefore we only follow private advocacy. There are cases for example where we cannot continue. We would like to engage through public communication initiatives, but it is better not to because at the same time we were following private negotiations with the government.”²⁰

Clearly in Jordan and Lebanon, as in many refugee hosting contexts across the globe, NGOs have to frequently assess communication and public advocacy against a cost-benefit analysis of threats to their wider in-country operations. This caution is probably another important factor in trying to understand the reasons behind this aspect of invisibility. All this notwithstanding, the visual absence of protection concern remains a significant gap in humanitarian communication and particularly with regards to NGOs’ objectives of raising awareness and mobilize support on the condition of displacement that, in this way, remain largely invisible.

In Greece, Syrian refugees were facing a different set of protection concerns, as an MSF manager explained: “First, the need for safe passages and legal passages. I am not talking about the opening of borders but official safe routes. Second, the EU needs to assume its responsibilities. We publicly took a position against the EU-Turkey deal with our publication One year from the EU-Turkey deal: challenging the EU’s alternative facts. Third, the fact that camps are not a solution. Then, on a secondary level, we also have to address refugees living conditions and wellbeing.”²¹

The impact of the EU-Turkey deal on Syrians on the move was, as noted earlier, frequently mentioned by NGO interviewees. As a Save the Children communications specialist in Greece told me: “Currently one of the key messages is around the EU-Turkey deal, on the impact that the deal has on the kids especially on the islands. Their psychosocial status is increasingly worse with more and more attempting suicide and harming themselves. We are calling for the EU to improve conditions on the islands, take families and children out of the detention centers, give them a fair right to asylum and that every European country does it fair share for resettlement. (…) We are also putting pressure on the government to remove children and families from detention centers and send them to Athens. The problem is that this would mean a breach of the EU-Turkey deal according to which the refugees should either stay on the islands or be sent back to Turkey.”²²

Beside critique of the EU-Turkey deal, NGO staffers also mentioned other concerns for mobile Syrians. Everybody agreed that the top priority was the situation in particular camps such as Moria on Lesbos where most residents were single men, encaged behind tall fences with lack of activities and additionally the presence of minors in a volatile security environment.²³ The case of Greece is particularly interesting because the journey of Syrians on the move through the Balkan route into central Europe is probably not only the best visually documented, but also the one that best reflects border closures, the harsh conditions faced by refugees and protection risks. NGO images of this movement include a much wider range of visual themes than found in the way refugees in Syria’s neighbors are represented. At the visual level there appears to be more coherence with the key protection concerns highlighted by humanitarian practitioners.

The reason behind this exception could be that in the “economy of attention” (Citton 2014) –in which NGOs like all communication actors compete – the space available has been wider when the so-called refugee emergency impacted Europe compared with humanitarian conditions in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon that remained more distant for the (mostly European) Western audience. This highlights, again, the differential attention which humanitarian agencies give to contexts of need in different parts of the world. It also shows that the representation of displacement can have a much wider set of visual themes than the threat/threatening dichotomy which we are used to. The visual elements of borders, fences, restricted mobility, law enforcement, corpses and coffins, contribute to a depiction of the situation that is more complex and therefore closer to conveying actual displacement conditions. Instead of undermining the main argument of this chapter – the importance of presence and absence – this confirms that the dialectic between visibilities and invisibilities is crucial in better understanding the potential for NGOs’ visual material in terms both of oppression or emancipation. The power of (in)visibilities is exactly that of further concealing, or better highlighting, the humanitarian, political and security implications that a specific situation has on the lives of the people involved.

2.4 Refugees Voices: Silence and Invisibility

Make people’s voices heard! This is an imperative for most of the agencies here studied. It constitutes a key point of action. Save the children’s advocacy strategy is directed toward two objectives. The agency “advocates and campaigns for change to realize children’s rights and to ensure that their voices are heard” (Save the Children 2017). In a strategy document the agency affirms it will always “be the voice: advocate and campaign for better practices and policies to fulfill children’s rights and to ensure their voices are heard (particularly most marginalized or those living in poverty)” (Save the Children 2016, 3). Oxfam’s Strategic Plan 2013–2019 affirm that its vision “sets local communities and the voices of women, men and young people at the centre of change” (Oxfam 2013, 5) and that the organization “will put a particular focus on gender justice and empowering poor people to make their voices heard” (Oxfam 2013, 8). “Oxfam believes that people living in poverty who claim their rights and make their voices heard constitute an enormous source of hope for real change and greater power in people’s lives” (Oxfam 2013, 9). Along similar lines, CARE declares that the organization puts “empowering women and girls at the centre of what we do, providing opportunities for their advancement and ensuring their voices are heard” (Care International 2017, 8). By contrast, MSF does not mention such a programmatic objective in any of its official strategic documents. Only one of the agency’s publications – entitled Hear my voice (MSF OCA 2012) – makes reference to this to this rhetoric. MSF’s emphasis on speaking out publicly when it witnesses extreme violence or when crises are neglected, marks it out, as noted earlier, from the other agencies studied. Save the Children, Oxfam and CARE explicitly state their role in making people’s voices heard, while MSF retains the option to raise its own organizational voice. The emphasis given by humanitarian organizations to this programmatic objective and the fact that it constitutes a common strategy, indicates its centrality in humanitarian discourse and aspiration to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable and marginalized. But it is also part of NGOs’ attempts to challenge securitized accounts of refugees by conveying individual stories and highlighting the human dimension of displacement through people’s own voices. Against this background, I believe it is crucial to explore the value and meaning of invisibility and silence.

A note here is in order here to clear way the confusion that may be caused by this apparently strange synesthesia.²⁴ From an analytical perspective, I am equating silence with invisibility and having one’s voice heard with visibility. It is no coincidence that in a blog post on Oxfam websites’ policy and practices section, the two dimensions are mixed up. For the organization Gender and Governance Adviser in fact, raising women’s voices means ‘making women’s invisibility, visible’ (OXFAM 2017). More generally, silence and invisibility have been treated in academic literature in the different disciplines as two sides of the same coin (e.g. Dimitrov 2015; Sparkes 1994; Simms 1986; Kim 1998; Coombs et al. 2014). It has probably have to do with the fact that the two dimensions are associated with the politics of hiding (Jones et al. 2016). Indeed, both notions have to do with absence and presence and visual practices can be used ambivalently to empowering and give voice, or on the contrary, to conceal or silence specific groups of people. This section is focused on exploring how absence, invisibility and silence constitute the humanitarian subject and how this representation resonates with the securitization of Syrian refugees.

Reflecting on silence and securitization, Lene Hansens’ article on The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School (2000) addresses gender in securitization theory. Leaving aside her discussion on gender – or, rather, the lack of consideration of it in the Copenhagen School –her considerations on silence are particularly relevant for this analysis. Hansen argues that the framing of a particular issue in terms of security cannot occur in situations where the referent object is silent or silenced. I will return to this point in my discussion of ‘silence’ in the visual material. Hansen calls for an epistemological inclusion of non-verbal forms of communication such as the visual. Following this logic, silence and silencing, exactly like absence and invisibility appear strictly interconnected with securitization processes. This is all the more evident if we move from a conception of securitization as a speech act, in the strict sense of the term, and embrace a wider notion of securitization utterances that includes the visual.

What is strikingly absent from NGOs’ visual material is exactly the different voices, the opinions and positions of the people directly impacted by displacement and humanitarian assistance. As I have stressed above, relief organizations’ visual communication has undoubtedly privileged a representation of people on the move highlighting their individuality and personal traits, a depiction that has moved away from photos of indistinguishable people that Malkki has defined as a “miserable sea of humanity” (Malkki 1996, 377). In almost every single case, the pictures are accompanied by captions, posts or quotations that give some insight into the personal trajectories of the people photographed. Although very often names are changed for reasons of confidentiality and security, almost all images are complemented by some textual information on who is the represented subject, how old s/he is, where s/he comes from and what is his/her problem.

There is an Oxfam portrait of a woman where every detail of her lineaments is in sharp focus (Oxfam 2016a). Behind her piercing stare, we can see her dark brown eyes, every wrinkle, underling the expression of gravity and pride of this older woman. We are so close to her that we can see the print of her scarf and the texture of the scarf that frames her lower jaw. The background is out of focus, in the typical style of portraits, where everything is about the person photographed. The caption indicates that this picture was been taken by a professional photographer, Sam Tarling, commissioned by Oxfam. The style, the choice regarding the depth of focus, the eye-to-eye angle of the shot, the perfect lighting, the direct gaze, everything draws attention to this woman, her individuality, the distinctiveness of her face and her gaze. Accompanying text gives us some information: “Amna from Deraa in Syria inside her caravan in Zaatari camp. When Amna and her family arrived in Zaatari they all had to sleep in just two tents with blankets but no mats to protect them from the stony ground below. Amna said there was no water and sanitation in her area of the camp until Oxfam installed them” (Oxfam 2016c).

The scope of this picture and the text is to offer the viewer some insight into the lives of Syrian refugees in Jordan. The article containing the image is entitled “From Syria to Zaatari: glimpses of refugees in Jordan.” ‘Glimpses’ is a revealing choice of word, referring to the possibility of seeing how it is like, looking at the faces of the people affected by war and displacement. It is about visibility. However, despite the intensity of the portrait, we still do not know anything about this woman. How was her life in Syria? How is she doing in Jordan? All that we get to know is that she was living in an uncomfortable situation and that thanks to Oxfam conditions in the camp have improved. Her gaze, her powerful eyes, her wrinkled visage all hint at more. We expect her to start telling us what brought her from home in the southern Syrian city of Daara to Zaatari, a massive refugee camp outside the Jordanian city of Mafraq. But there is nothing more. She appears again elsewhere on Oxfam’s website, this time looking away from the camera, her portrait used as the face of “Crisis in Syria” (Oxfam 2016b). This time, there is even less about her. She simply serves the purpose of encouraging us to click on the “donate” arrow to the left of her image.

Similar dynamics are at play elsewhere. Interestingly, a 2016 CARE photo gallery (entitled “Dear World. Photos Capture Syrian Refugees Voices” there are a series of single images with no accompanying background information. Delving deeper, I found that two American photographers, Robert Fogarty and Ben Reece, had first given their subjects marker pens and then encouraged them to write messages to world leaders on their arms and hands. Then Reece and Fogarty, who travelled with CARE to Jordan in 2013, photographed them’ (CARE 2013). In the gallery, each image, exactly as in Fogarty’s Dear World project,²⁵ is either a portrait of a single individual or a small group of children. All the represented participants have words written on their arms, messages to the world. For example, there is the picture of a girl, her face and hand badly burned, looking directly into the camera (and to the viewer). The caption gives us some information that explain the wounds on her face, results of the bombing of her house and lack of immediate health care (CARE 2016). As in the cases mentioned above, this portrait has a strong potential, but it is in a way limited by its use. Each person becomes a message. It is more about the slogan than about people’s voices. Once again, I am not questioning the image per se, which in this case, as in many others of its kind, represents people with dignity and pride, thus far from the stereotypical victimization of the humanitarian subject. The problem of these representations is that they claim to represent people’s voices. But the personal trajectories, the different lived experiences, the individual opinions and narratives of these people remain largely invisible. While it is quite evident that NGOs producing these images are attempting to empower the represented participants and to draw attention to ‘human face’ of war and displacement, there is so much that is left out of the picture that eventually the photographic act remakes them invisible.

They become visible only as humanitarian subjects while their real individuality, their lives, stories, trajectories, perspectives, and claims remain completely invisible. Most of the pictures focusing on the individuals affected by the Syrian war and displacement mention names, ages, maybe one sentence of information on where the person is living or which particular humanitarian programme is helping him/her. What is ultimately lacking in all these pictures is refugees’ voices, genuine ones that cannot be simply reduced to a sentence of accompanying textual information. The messages, indeed, can be very powerful and useful in a communication-commercial perspective, just as much as words on mugs, T-shirts or other merchandise, can be. Clearly, this is important especially considering that NGOs have to fundraise to enable field interventions and that media campaigns are used to draw public attention to humanitarian situations.

What, however, is important is not to equate such photo projects and media campaigns²⁶ with providing refugees with an opportunity to have their voices heard. Buried behind hundreds of images portraying Ahmad, an 8-year-old from Aleppo, Du’a, a 5-year-old from Homs, or Huda, 38 year-old mother of two from Daraa, people remain invisible and the opportunities for them to speak and for us to hear them seriously limited.

As Bal has brilliantly put it, the “thing on display comes to stand for something else, the statement about it. It comes to mean. The thing recedes into invisibility as its sign status takes precedence to make the statement” (Bal 1996, 4). These kinds of images, representing single individuals or small group of people, with very sparse information seeking to ‘put a name to a face’ constitute a dominant visual theme of present-day humanitarian communication. Whereas they have helped the shift from preoccupation with a ‘sea of humanity’ to engaging with individuals affected by the crisis, they have not managed to give people a voice or make them individually noticeable, beyond their likeness in communication material. The possibilities of expression are evidently limited by the communication format that creates the space for people’s voices: there is room for one sentence on the arm, one object to symbolize the experience of loss, one phrase to describe what they miss the most after years of displacement. These visual projects have great potential from a communication and fundraising perspective. Thanks to the combination of various semiotics resources at play (including direct gaze, eye-level angle, close-up shot and subtle lighting) they do spark an emotional connection between the viewer and the represented participants. By evoking engagement and a close social relation, the photographic choices about contact, distance, perspective, and angle reinforce the request for our involvement with the subjects of the image. The potentiality of these pictures to mobilize attention and humanitarian response are not in question. What is vital is to realize, however, is that they are not a means through which to convey the variety of people’s voices, opinions and claims. It is misleading and unjust to assume Syrians’ voices can be represented by such photographic projects.

It is important to observe that not all images are like those presented above. In some cases, there were more than one picture representing each individual personal story and the text provided more information on a specific person or family, an example is the Save the Children article, Layla and Sana sleep without fear of snakes (Save the Children 2016). The article and pictures show how Layla’s and Sana’s family have faced prolonged difficulties, most especially with regard to shelter. The piece describes the father’s challenges in finding a job (but again without entering into the thorny issue of how host states erect obstacles to any kind of income generating activity), the lack of proper accommodation that caused their mother to miscarry and the children’s fears. The article concludes with information how the agency has intervened to provide better shelter.

In this case, as in many others the focus is the intervention of the organization and how this has improved the situation of the represented participants. Both at the visual and textual level we cannot understand anything more about their situation, beyond their humanitarian need. The focus is not really about who we see in the pictures, certainly not about their voices: rather, it is about what NGOs are doing. People remain consistently invisible and what we receive is an abstract humanitarian ‘subject’. This hyper-visibility of the humanitarian subject happens at the expenses of the possibility of visibility for individuals with their varied expressions, narratives and experiences.

Looking at this (in)visibility through the lenses of securitization theory, it seems that contemporary visual representations of Syrians, while aiming to make people’s voices heard, continues only to underline their humanitarian needs and silence any other individual and collective claim. In this sense, NGOs’ communication reproduces a narrative in which the person is ‘only’ the referent object of a threat in need of external intervention. Any other claim is silenced.

In a ground-breaking article on the universalizing depiction of people on the move as “refugees”, Malkki (1996) has argued that: “One of the most far-reaching, important consequences of these established representational practices is the systematic, even if unintended, silencing of persons who find themselves in the classificatory space of ‘refugee’. That is, refugees suffer from a peculiar kind of speechlessness in the face of national and international organizations whose object of care and control they are. Their accounts are disqualified almost a priori, while the languages of refugee relief, policy science, and ‘development’ claim the production of narratives about refugees” (Malkki 1996, 386).

Her analysis is primarily based on representation of refugees escaping genocide in Burundi in 1972 in Rwanda in 1994, typically depicted as speechless, universal victims, masses of bodies. As I have noted before, present-day humanitarian communication has put a great deal of effort into moving away from such visual representation. However, this ‘new’ representation notwithstanding, they remain largely speechless. What we hear is seriously limited by the NGO’s intermediary role.

In trying to find a solution for the ‘little mermaid security dilemma’, to give voice to those affected by crisis, NGOs mediate this voice. The problem is that while trying to address the silence of vulnerable people NGOs are re-silencing them by the manner in which they seek to speak on their behalf. As Fassin has insightfully pointed out: “Of course, the humanitarian agents who collect accounts or carry out inquiries to reveal the violence or injustice suffered by oppressed or displaced or bombed populations base their testimony partly on what the victims of this violence or these injustices say about them. Their third-person testimony is grounded on first-person testimonies. However, the requirements of defending causes and the logic of their intervention lead them to what might be termed a humanitarian reduction of the victim. On the one hand, all that is retained of people’s words is what contributes to a telling image in the public space. (…) On the other hand, the individuals in question tend to conform to this portrait, knowing that it will have an impact on public opinion, and thus offer to the humanitarian agents the part of their experience that feeds the construction of them as human beings crushed by fate. (…) It is rather that if one believes that what distinguishes humans from other living beings is language and meaning and that what makes human life unique is therefore that it can be recounted, as Hannah Arendt asserts, then humanitarian testimony establishes two forms of humanity and two sorts of life in the public space: there are those who can tell stories and those whose stories can be told only by others” (Fassin 2007, 517).

Refugees’ voices are invisible or unheard because they get lost in the process of NGOs communication production. Rajaram has noted how “bureaucratization of knowledge” (Rajaram 2002, 248) and the mediation of refugee’s experience in making the refugees’ voices heard, fails to problematize and acknowledge the presence of the author and, most importantly, her/his position. By investigating an Oxfam project entitled Listening to the Displaced, he concludes that humanitarian representation eventually “consigns refugees to their bodies, to a mute and faceless physical mass” (Rajaram 2002, 247) with the ultimate consequence of silencing them and commodifying their experiences.

Several dynamics that Rajaram highlights are very similar to the ones at play in the visual representation of Syrian displacement. As he notes, through the process of leveling and abstracting refugee voices to make everyone’s voices heard – including those in vulnerable categories of children, women and older persons – NGOs downgrade the compound nature of people’s identities. They purport to aim to allow people to speak for themselves yet NGOs do not question the general structure and politics of the humanitarian enterprise, with the result that the only narration around displaced people is the one that fits with humanitarian needs and the relevance of relief intervention. In fact, as Solomon-Godeau has argued, “dominant social relations are inevitably both reproduced and reinforced in the act of imaging those who do not have access to the means of representation themselves” (Solomon-Godeau and Nochlin 1991, 180). The text and images here examined may be poignant, powerful elicitors of sympathy. However, they are deprived of politics and context, confining refugees to their essentialized bodies “invariably detached from the local historical context of the reality that they supposedly represent” (Escobar 1999, 108 quoted in Rajaram 2002, 256).

Any form of self-representation is strikingly absent in the contemporary high-tech media and social media landscape within which NGOs disseminate visual material on humanitarian crises. The complete denial to refugees of opportunity to represent themselves, has mostly remained overlooked by academia with a few notable exceptions (Chouliaraki 2017; Literat 2017; De Leeuw and Rydin 2007). Of relevance is anecdotal experience recounted by a professional photographer who has worked in Jordan throughout the refugee crisis. In 2016, she was commissioned by Save the Children teach photography to young people in Zaatari camp: “I gave an assignment to my students: to take pictures to tell us about their life as refugees in Jordan, and I asked them to write captions to accompany the photos. They did a tremendous job but what impressed me the most was the fact that the captions completely inverted the sense we are used to giving to pictures produced in the context of a refugee camps. For instance, I remember that a smiling girl with a red stuffed animal (that make me immediately think of the photographic trope of portraits of children with a favorite toy). The caption said: my sister is smiling because we always fight over this stuffed animal and she finally managed to win it this time (instead of the poor Syrian refugee who could not save anything else when she fled her house). Similarly, I have seen pictures taken by people cooking a good meal on the occasion of a holiday and the caption: today is a great day, we get together, we eat meat, we will enjoy.”²⁷ When I asked her where I could see these pictures and the results of the photographic project, she told me that, sadly and despite all her efforts, the agency did not want to organize an exhibition and, as far as she knew, never used any of the photos in communication materials.

This story is paradigmatic in showing how refugees’ self-representation could add a variety of new meanings and visual narratives to the ones typically (and stereotypically) used in present-day humanitarianism. Sigona has pointed out how the diversity and plurality of refugees’ voices “does not necessarily translate into humanitarian, academic, and media discourse, as these tend to privilege a one-dimensional representation of the refugee which relies heavily on feminized and infantilized images of ‘pure’ victimhood and vulnerability” (Sigona 2013, 370).

3 Conclusion

This chapter has explored the value of absence. It has done so with an eye on the securitizing framework typical of NGOs’ representation of displacement both in terms of human security and in their attempt to challenge media and populist discourses that depict refugees as threat. It has shown that topics or events that can be very relevant to the lives of people living in displacement or on the move tend to be left aside by NGOs in their representation of the humanitarian emergency. Symbolic and non-symbolic references to politics such as signs of victory or display of national or factional flags are completely absent from relief organization’s visual repertoire. This absence seems to be linked with NGOs’ explicit intention to not implicate themselves in local conflict politics, to keep their humanitarian work as distant as possible from any perception of political involvement of either the organization or of the beneficiaries.

At the same time, the absence of politics is also a way to protect assisted refugees whose relatives inside Syria could be at risk if they were thought to be affiliated with protagonists. Protest is absent from NGOs’ visual communication. Contestation and protests by people on the move may sometimes be represented in media accounts but not in those generated by relief organizations. They most likely exclude protests in order to not unnecessarily fuel securitized discourses that depict refugees in terms of threat. However, the absence of the visual themes of politics and protest has also the effect of silencing the voice and the political agency of refugees, eventually and perversely doing the opposite, silencing their political agency and depoliticizing refugees.

The third section of the chapter investigated the visual presence/absence of the threat to people on the move. When refugees are represented as threatened, the way the threat to their lives is depicted becomes relevant, especially in a securitizing framework in which for the securitizing move to start the referent object needs to be presented at serious risk of a specific set of threats. Regarding the threats in Syria, the analysis has shown that most of the pictures represented war and its effects through images of destruction: bombed buildings, ruins, rescue personnel frantically plucking people from the rubble. Such images powerfully chronicle the level of devastation yet consistently leave out any representation of the perpetrators – whether as the Syrian military, militias, weapons, tanks or those who direct aerial bombardments. Their visual absence, the aesthetic equivalent of the grammatical stratagem of ‘passive agent deletion’, has the ultimate effect of concealing the perpetrator, with all the implications of such an ideological move.

Moving from threats inside Syria to threats in host countries or those through which refugees seek to pass, the investigation of the visual presence of the top protection issues mentioned by humanitarian practitioners in each country visited during fieldwork has revealed a more complex situation. In Lebanon and Jordan analysis has demonstrated a strong disconnection between the topics that NGOs’ staff identified as priority concerns and the visual themes present in the images. Basically, none of the topics raised by humanitarian practitioners was included in the NGOs’ visual material. Exploring key humanitarian concerns in Greece and, more generally those arising from the arrival of Syrians in Europe, the analysis has revealed a much tighter connection between the visual and the protection discourse with images presenting the set of visual topics considered to be top humanitarian priorities.

This chapter has also explored the presence/absence of refugee voices in the humanitarian communications, highlighting the superficiality of introducing specific individual stories. Often, the only insight we (as audience) get to know about the lives of those portrayed is their name and age. Even when more details are provided on individuals, the representation is limited to their humanitarian need with any other aspect constituting the person, beyond his/her humanitarian subjectivity, is often overlooked. It is as if the hyper-visibility of the human face of the humanitarian crisis is only possible at the expense of the visibility of individual, remain mostly invisible and undistinguishable from others. It is in the mediation role that NGOs undertake in their attempt to ‘make refugees voices heard’, that their voices get eventually lost. The analysis has also shown how any form of self-representation by people on the move is left out from the organization’s communication material. The effect is to leave NGOs as the only actors enabled to speak or convey the refugees’ voices, inevitably reducing them to their humanitarian vulnerability and victimhood through the mediation process.

The investigation has also shown that both visual presence and absence can reinforce an emancipatory or oppressive message. This is particularly evident in the case of the (in)visibility of politics and protest where the absence of these visual themes simultaneously works toward the depoliticization but also the (securitized) protection of the people on the move. This chapter, and the last section in particular, has highlighted how the visibility of a wider set of visual themes on a specific issue (e.g., not only the basic humanitarian need faced by Syrians on the move seeking refuge in Europe, but also fences, borders and law enforcement agencies) could potentially offer a more complex and nuanced depiction of displacement in its wider political context. In short, the more that is shown about the historical and political situatedness of a crisis, the less people affected by it are described only in terms of threatened victims in need of humanitarian protection. The value of visibility, in the end, is therefore in being able to confer more agency to the people represented.