1 Transnational Humanitarian NGOs and Global Governance

The investigation of the four relief agencies’ organizational models – undertaken by combining analysis of websites, strategic documents and policy guidelines with fieldwork and interviews with NGO staffers – has shown the different ways in which each organization works. Exploration of the different sectors of intervention has highlighted the different roles NGOs want to have not only in the lives of their beneficiaries but more generally in the governance system of their communities. As illustrated in Chap. 5, the spectrum of activities is quite wide. Save the Children focuses on education and child protection (mainly through psychosocial support) complementary advocacy to secure policy change to enable a better world for children; Oxfam prioritizes ‘giving voice’ to the voiceless, water and sanitation, psychosocial support, legal counselling, combined also with a vigorous advocacy and influencing program to create lasting solutions to injustice and poverty. CARE has a similar focus on voice and empowerment especially for women and girls. Its gender transformative approach informs its work on protection, responses to gender-based violence distribution of relief items, and, to a lesser extent, water and sanitation. As with Save the Children and Oxfam, CARE sets store by advocacy for policy reforms to end poverty and gender inequality. For its part, MSF operations focused on medical assistance, ranging from primary health care, surgery, mental health and psychosocial support, and medical evacuation. For MSF, belief in the power of témoignage has driven denunciations of those who hinder humanitarian action or divert aid and also critique of the wider disfunctionalities of the humanitarian system itself.

The analysis has highlighted that despite diverse backgrounds, foci, and sectors of intervention, Save the Children, Oxfam and CARE all embody the typical organization of what some scholars have defined as ‘new humanitarianism.’ They are all heavily dependent on government-based funding. This makes their relationship with state politics and their ability to negotiate independence from the overarching priorities of states complex, to say the least. Moreover, the three NGOs (in common with many other INGOs and UN agencies) have embraced collaboration with private capital as a positive opportunity for the development of humanitarian action. This has given rise to doubts as to the level of independence of humanitarian action vis-a-vis the economic and commercial priorities that, by definition, inspire the private sector.

In all three cases, the humanitarian goal has been combined with long-term development objectives, a holistic approach ideally able to ‘tackle the root causes’ of deprivation and human rights abuses. These substantial transformative ambitions are paradigmatic of the three organizations and their desire to play an active role in global governance. This is indicated not only in their aim to influence policy and societal change at the national and international level, but also in the fact that these transformational objectives have become a defining character of their respective organizational models. A distinctive common feature is the consistent shift toward a rights-based approach that privileges the promotion and the protection of human rights instead of targeting ‘only’ people’s basic needs. In this sense, the rights-based approach is more aligned with a form of comprehensive humanitarian action that is interested in the individual as a rights-holder whose needs can be tackled only via addressing the political, economic, religious and cultural factors that underpin prevention of enjoyment of rights. Save the Children, Oxfam and CARE indeed claim for themselves an important role in global governance. For the three organizations, shaping, changing and inspiring policy change in the societies within which they operate is intended as a fundamental part of their mission. Paradoxically, however, they all understand and present their humanitarian rights-based work as purely technical, through their focus on rights, considered as a neutral dimension, located outside any political sphere.

MSF presents and performs its role in almost total opposition to the other NGOs. It has chosen to focus on a purely humanitarian mandate (as opposed to combining this with development work typical of multi-mandate agencies), to largely limit interventions to medical assistance, and to provide aid on the basis of need, instead of rights. This organizational model is combined with a quasi-independence from institutional funds and a strict policy on which funds to accept from governments. In this sense, MSF has opted for a unique position. Not claiming a role in global governance, MSF frequently stresses its only has medical and emergency intentions. At the same time, however, the NGO is the only one of those studied that has repeatedly stated that politics is a crucial dimension of its humanitarian work

In general, the analysis of the four transnational humanitarian NGOs’ operations and sectors of intervention in the Syrian displacement response has shown that, despite internal variations and differences, they all perform work with implicit important political consequences in the communities and societies in which they operate and beyond. Each specific way through which relief agencies provide emergency assistance not only shapes humanitarian governance but the way refugees are perceived and ‘managed’ in global governance dynamics. In this sense, however, humanitarian performance does not unfold in an intellectual vacuum. On the contrary, interviews with practitioners have confirmed academic studies that have highlighted elevated levels of organizational reflexivity. NGO staffers have invested great efforts in proactively assessing, and reflecting on, the role and impact of their work. My conversations with humanitarian and advocacy practitioners and analysis of their organizational intervention modalities have shown how relief agencies do not only reflect extensively on the relationship that they intend to have with politics and global governance, but also how these internal reflections inform changes over time in their strategies, policies and operational principles.

2 Transnational Humanitarian NGOs and Securitization

This book has also explored the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs play in global governance, particularly with regard to the securitization of the refugee issue, through the way they visually represent people on the move. Analysis of the relief agencies’ photographic accounts of Syrian displacement in 2015–2016 has shown that they contribute to the securitization of the refugee issue in three different yet interrelated ways. These I have conceptualized around three analytical themes: threatening, threatened and (in)visibilities.

With the term threatening, I refer to how NGOs’ images contribute to reproduce the mainstream securitized media and political accounts depicting refugees in terms of threats. In this category I have identified five different aesthetic patterns that support a representation of displaced Syrians as threatening, thereby reinforcing a discursive process of securitization. The visual analysis has highlighted how humanitarian organizations’ pictures of long lines of people pointing visually inside a familiar territory, with no visual goal in front of them, evoking penetrating arrows, support the narrative of the invasion. Similarly, the now quite familiar photos of overcrowded boats produced by relief agencies have, despite the use of innovative and alternative visual elements, continued to depict ‘boat people’ as dehumanized and incumbent masses, as ‘others’ eliciting feelings of fear among the public. In general images that represent people on the move as an exceptional emergency support a rhetoric of crisis and invasion that has pervaded populist and media securitized discourses on global mobility in general, and the European refugee/migration ‘crisis in particular. Representation of the threatening refugee also is reinforced by images that consistently represent Syrians in abstract terms, essentialized people on the move, with no individuality, agency, political claims, or personal trajectories. In a similar way, pictures that represent the ‘other’, in binary terms as someone alien from ‘us’, reproduce a narrative based on questions of luck rather than justice, fail to facilitate comprehension of the wider political context and also reinforce an understanding of refugees as an exception and a threat to the otherwise ‘normal’ order of things.

It is very important to note that, overall, images of this kind are a minority and do not constitute a dominant form of humanitarian representation. However, their presence, even if marginal, acquires significant meaning when inscribed into the wider context of communication around refugees. In this sense, humanitarian discourse is expected – both by the general public and by how relief agencies present themselves – to defy media and populist accounts consistently depicting people on the move in terms of threat, and rather present an alternative narrative, a more ‘humanitarian’ one. Against this background, I have shown how NGOs have, in this sense, failed to move away and challenge these securitized accounts. Indeed, how to a certain extent, they have contributed to their reproduction and reinforcement. In so doing, I am not arguing that humanitarian organizations are intentionally reproducing a depiction of refugees in terms of threat. On the contrary, I acknowledge their efforts to defy mainstream securitized discourses. However, the intrinsic polysemic character of any pictorial representation allows for multiple meanings to be present in a single image. The combination of visual semiotic resources contributing to the representation of Syrian refugees in terms of threat has highlighted that this specific meaning cannot be overlooked in exploring the way in which humanitarian NGOs interrelate with securitization processes around refugees.

At the same time, it is crucial to underline that in their evident attempt to challenge media and populist political discourses that have represented people on the move as a threat, NGOs have tended to privilege a depiction of refugees as, rather, the referent object of the threat, as threatened. This concept is strictly connected with the changes that have interested the humanitarian enterprise over the last three decades: a re-conceptualization of the notion of human security which has put the individual and his/her protection at the very centre of the international security system, and the progressive shift from a needs-based towards a rights-based approach that considers beneficiaries of assistance as rights-holders. This paradigm shift has gone hand in hand with substantial changes in NGOs’ humanitarian visual communication. The typical image of present-day humanitarian crisis is no longer that of a starving baby, but that of a displaced child stripped by war of her/his right to education. The threatened analytical theme is, indeed, the most widespread aesthetic pattern of contemporary humanitarian representation.

This study has explored six different visual themes contributing to the representation of Syrian refugees as threat in order to demonstrate how this representation, while opposed to that of threatening individuals, is simultaneously just another form of securitization, whereby Syrians are depicted as infantilized and passive victims in need of external intervention.

Images of pity, quite typical of traditional humanitarian communication, are still present in today’s visual material and show an over-representation of women that implies a sort of embodied vulnerability in the female subject. Moreover, and most importantly, the iconography of pity – strictly connected with the religious iconography of pietas – utilizes the language of urgency instead of justice, thereby calling for immediate interventions that can end the suffering while concealing the wider socio-economic and political causes of that distress. Likewise, vivid images of suffering and physical pain found in the NGOs’ visual material produce similar effects and underline the asymmetrical distance between the viewer and the (suffering and passive) represented participant.

The analysis has also confirmed a depiction of Syrian refugees, extensively discussed in the literature in other refugee contexts, in terms of essentialized victims. The representation of Syrian refugees as helpless and passive victims is further reinforced by a clear over-representation of children, that by metonymically symbolizing the general humanitarian subject, infantilizes people on the move, reproducing a colonial and paternalistic account. A further contribution, though with a different aesthetic pattern, has similar effects. This is the visual narrative of the ‘white hero’ saving the ‘distant other’ that reinforces a dichotomous and asymmetrical understanding of human solidarity.

Finally, the analysis has focused on the aesthetic pattern of innocence largely used by NGOs in their effort to defy representations of refugees as threat. Beside the positive symbolic value attributed to innocence, these kinds of images also contribute to the reification of dichotomous categories of deserving and undeserving refugees that remain caught in a perverse dynamic in which the burden of proof of innocence falls back on them. At the same time, the exploration of NGOs’ photographic production has also highlighted a new important trend of humanitarian visual representation, a quite widely used representation seeking to show beneficiaries with dignity and empowerment. This more positive illustration of people on the move as rights-holders, however, simultaneously contributes to their securitization. It does so by diluting their individuality through an essentialized depiction as humanitarian subjects, by shaping the protection authority that the humanitarian actors have over them and by constituting the humanitarian intervention as the most legitimized security strategy to address human insecurity.

These different forms of securitized representation – in terms of threatened humanitarian subject, regardless of whether illustrations are positive or negative, not only fail to fulfill the emancipatory promise of the rights-based human security framework, but also reinforce securitized discourses of humanitarian governance. In fact, by reinforcing a depiction of Syrian refugees with limited agency, that weakens people on the move political claims, they inscribe them into dependency and protection dynamics that require external intervention and management.

Finally, the analysis of what is visible and what is invisible in the transnational humanitarian NGOs’ photographic representation of Syrian displacement – the analytical theme of (in)visibilities – has shown how visual absence can contribute to the securitization of the refugee issue. The exploration of the invisibilities has highlighted how topics that are important for Syrians on the move such as political support for particular factions (political symbols or gestures) and protests (individual and collective contestation) are completely absent from NGOs visual communication.

Their absence is explained by different reasons, including the intention to protect humanitarian beneficiaries from potential security repercussions and relief organizations’ efforts to not actively reproduce accounts of threatening refugees. The invisibility of politics and protest has also the effect of silencing refugees and depriving them of political agency. The exploration of NGOs’ photos has also highlighted how the various factors that are causing suffering in Syria and displacement are completely overlooked. The only images connected to the topic of threat are in fact those of destruction and devastation from which, however, the perpetrator, armed groups, bombs or weapons remain completely absent. This invisibility, equivalent to the linguistic omission of specific grammatical elements, is not just a stylistic choice. It has political implications insofar it produces an account that conceals the real causes of threat. The same goes for the visual absence of the various kind of threats that affect Syrians in Jordan and Lebanon since the photos did not include any of the protection issues mentioned in various emergency reports and by NGO staff. The only exception is the visual account of the top humanitarian concerns on the situation of Syrian refugees in Greece, where the picture contained visual clues as to the protection priorities underlined by relief organizations, such as detention and border closures.

The investigation of visual absence has also considered its auditory equivalent: silence. In this sense, the analysis has demonstrated how despite the significant effort made by NGOs to ‘make refugees’ voices heard’, the mediatization of the process and the constant representation of people through the lenses of their humanitarian needs, have the effect of silencing refugees and reproducing an account that depicts them mostly, if not exclusively, in terms of humanitarian subjects with very limited agency and in need of external intervention.

2.1 On the Possibility of ‘Good’ Securitization

Drawing on the discussion above, it would be tempting to conclude that securitization can be seen as both a negative process (when refugees are depicted as threat), but also positive (when refugees are shown threatened for their own protection). Obviously, transnational humanitarian NGOs represent displaced Syrians people as threatened and in need of external intervention in order to mobilize financial and other support and solidarity. They operate within a competitive media environment in which they try to create an alternative narrative to the one proposed by populist and right-wing political discourses. However, even taking this into account, it is important to reflect whether the securitization of Syrian refugees is the most appropriate framing for the humanitarian cause or if it would other frameworks would be preferable. This study argues that although the two forms of securitizations – refugees as threat and refugees as threatened – are based on distinct, if not opposed, premises and although very different aesthetic registries are at play, both representations resonate with the logic of emergency and governmentality. Both depictions in fact reinforce a representation of people on the move as in need of management and control, given the extraordinariness of the situation. The findings therefore confirm what has been theoretically pointed out by a significant range of scholars who have explored the theoretical connections between humanitarianism and securitization (Aradau 2004; Huysmans and Squire 2009); with governance (Barnett 2013); biopolitics (Reid 2010; Rozakou 2012): the politics of life (Fassin 2007), and humanitarian interventions as part of an “emergency imaginary” (Calhoun 2004). It has also shown empirically for the first time how relief organizations play an active role in the securitization of the refugee issue.

This securitization framework is problematic for two main reasons. First of all because it implies the idea of emergency as a way to address crisis that does not take into consideration the dynamics producing an ‘emergency’. As Calhoun has observed, this perspective “also reflects a distanced view on the global system, a view from nowhere or an impossible everywhere that encourages misrecognition of the actual social locations from which distant troubles appear as emergencies” (Calhoun 2004, 378). The problem is that the securitization of an issues also implies the failure to deal with it through politics (Möller 2007), thus disregarding the political (but also social and economic) dynamics that need to be addressed. This view is in obvious contrast with transnational NGOs’ intention to mobilize support by raising awareness of distant suffering while aspiring to tackle ‘root causes’ of crises. In adopting the ‘emergency imaginary’, through both the threat and threatened representation, relief organizations contribute to inscribe Syrian refugees’ in this securitized framework, one that fails to provide an alternative message and is largely at odds with declared aspirations. As different NGOs’ strategic documents point out, to tackle the root causes of crises implies addressing questions of socio-economic discrimination and unequal power relations, aspects completely pushed into the background by an emergency scenario.

Secondly, the securitization of the refugee issue strongly resonates with discourses of migration management and control. Both when people are represented as threat and when they are represented as threatened, humanitarian actors are crucial to addressing and managing the situation. In this sense, also the threatened framework, in which refugees emerge as essentialized humanitarian subjects with limited agencies, contributes to a discourse of migration governance that reifies dichotomic and asymmetrical understandings of people and movements, depicting a group of people who need to be managed and another who charged with management. Clearly, this does not chime with relief organizations’ aspirations in the context of refugee response: as the analysis has demonstrated, the governance of international mobility is hardly a humanitarian NGOs’ priority. However, as Aradau (2004) has shown, the two seemingly antithetical humanitarian and securitization discursive regimes appear, rather, mutually constitutive when understood in terms of governmental processes.

Against this background, relief organizations’ appeal to the rights-based framework, far from representing a drastic change from securitization discourses, also fails to offer an alternative way to deal with today’s global mobility. The association of the two frameworks is not surprising even when one considers humanitarian NGOs’ emphasis on human rights and the rights-based approach. As this study has highlighted, many NGOs’ tend to emphasize the neutrality and rights-based technicality of their interventions. With the same exact logic, as Geiger and Pécoud have argued: “the very notion of ‘management’ is characterized by its apolitical and technocratic nature, and its popularity (to the detriment of other notions such as ‘the politics of migration’) is in itself a way of depoliticizing migration. Policies would not result from political choices, but from ‘technical’ considerations and informal decision-making processes on the most appropriate and successful way of addressing migration” (Geiger and Pécoud 2014, 11). Aradau has cogently observed that: “if human rights have become the rights of those who are too weak or too oppressed to actualize and enact them, they are not ‘their’ rights. They are deprived of political agency; the only rights are our rights to practice pity and humanitarian interventions. Victims are therefore divorced from the very possibility of political agency, turned into spectral presences on the scene of politics. (…) The political agency of the marginalised and the excluded, the powerless and the silenced is thus either effaced or pathologised, expunged from the truly political claims and implications it should have” (Aradau 2004, 276).

The recent humanitarian shift toward a rights-based approach (with its visual representation of the rights-holder with dignity and empowerment) has failed to substantially alter the mechanism of a dichotomous and asymmetrical power relation between the empowered rights-holder, to whom very limited agency is recognized, and the external (humanitarian) intervention that is urgently required to address abuse and human (in)security. In this sense, this study has empirically demonstrated what has been argued at the conceptual (Huysmans and Squire 2009) and practice level (Bigo 2002) on the migration/security nexus by also showing the specific role that humanitarian NGOs play. The study has highlighted how visual humanitarian discourse contributes to reinforcing a securitized discourse around refugees that justifies exclusionary distinctions between desirable and undesirable people on the move (Huysmans and Squire 2009), and that this eventually contributes to the securitization of migration (Bigo 2002, 2; Huysmans et al. 2006).

The analysis has not indicated that NGOs consider the securitization framework as the most efficient way through which to mobilize support and raise funds. It seems to suggest that they are truly attempting to find an alternative, more ‘humanitarian’ discourse. Interviews with practitioners and analysis of their strategic documents have highlighted a genuine effort to portray individuality, integrity, agency, empowerment and successes. However, the study has also shown how transnational humanitarian NGOs’ attempts to go beyond the securitization framework have not so far been sufficiently successful, indeed how this very framework entails a form of collateral damage, the loss of agency and disempowerment of Syrian displaced people. Securitized representation that aim to highlight the ‘emergency’ nature of the situation, even when framed in terms of protection, such as in the case of the threatened humanitarian subject, implies a loss of agency. Again, this is in contrast with efforts to empower and give voice to refugees.

A question arises from these reflections: how it is possible to represent Syrian displacement effectively (in order to mobilize support and raise awareness) without securitizing the object of the representation? It is difficult to deny that a depiction focusing on the threatened subject and his/her human security may be functional to NGOs’ struggles for public attention and resources. However, the implications of a securitized account are not exactly within the purposes of many relief organizations. Even while their securitized framework is effective to fundraise and draw attention to ‘emergencies’ the same NGOs have expressed intent to give voice to the voiceless and empower beneficiaries. In this sense, the study has highlighted how securitized accounts hardly empower refugees. An alternative discourse on global mobility – one able to fulfill transnational humanitarian organizations aspirations – appears possible only by renouncing the human security frame and opting for an approach based on the recognition of the political agency of people on the move. The rights-based approach – which most humanitarian actors and some scholars (Goodwin-Gill 2001; Piper and Rother 2012) identify as potentially inspiring alternative frameworks – can only work if human rights are re-conceptualized around people’s individual and collective political agency and not as a neutral and apolitical dimension. As Rancière has argued, attention to the individual is not sufficient to ensure her/his emancipation, unless accompanied by acknowledgment of the individual as a political member of the community (Rancière 1998). Providing a practical solution regarding the best ways to show individual and collective political agencies in the visual representation of refugees is beyond the scope of this study. The section which follows will highlight what are the best practices observed in NGOs’ visual communication and how these have potential to offer a non-securitized alternative humanitarian message.

It could be asked that if refugees are represented in positive terms and with full agency, why would they need any support? The point here is not to advocate for an artificially cheerful representation of Syrian refugees – where people are always smiling and portrayed as being in charge – because this would be naive and disregard the suffering that invariably accompanies conflict and displacement. However, a depiction of Syrians on the move including a wider array of visual themes, emotions, everyday challenges, and political agency would open new possibilities. Such a representation could offer clues regarding the wider socio-economic context and political dynamics. More focus on everyday experiences of refugees would allow transnational humanitarian NGOs to offer a better understanding of the distant suffering in response to which they seek to mobilise, while enabling a comprehension of the situation beyond the emergency and governance framework that, by eventually disempowering refugees, is of little help either to them or NGOs’ humanitarian cause.

3 Glimmers

After having illustrated the criticalities, it is equally important to turn to the possibilities for change. To use a visual metaphor, the multi-modal analysis has identified what I would like to call glimmers. It is possible to recognize minor alterations in humanitarian discourse and spaces of visibility that can potentiality produce an alternative humanitarian discourse. It would be presumptuous –and beyond the scope of this study –to here offer solutions to the various problematic aspects highlighted by the study (especially those linked to the complicated question of political agency). What is important is to underline what the analysis has identified as positive trends in humanitarian discourse around refugees and modes of visual expression.

Firstly, interviews with practitioners, knowledge gained in the field and exploration of relief organizations’ strategic documents have revealed that transnational humanitarian NGOs are trying hard to go beyond a securitized framework. As noted, in recent decades the humanitarian enterprise has shown high levels of internal reflexivity. The emphasis that NGOs attach to considering and depicting beneficiaries with dignity, empowerment and agency is an important sign of the direction that relief organizations are attempting to move in. In this sense, each agency’s communication guidelines and such joint initiatives as the Code of Conduct on Images and Messages (Concord 2006) demonstrate that relief organizations are perfectly aware of how images should, or should not, look like. They encourage visual representations that show ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’, and ‘justice’, and call for rejection of images that can to stereotype, sensationalize or discriminate. They endeavor to ensure people may speak for themselves aiming to improve public understanding of the complexities of the situation on the ground. The way that NGO managements internally sign-off and disseminate depictions are meant to control visual communication and acknowledge how wrong images can have wrong effects. So far, these noble intentions there have only produced minor changes in how refugees are represented – such as more individual portraits, smiling faces or confident gazes – but they have the potentiality to influence change.

By focusing specifically on visuality, this study has shown that the visual presence of a wider range of aesthetic themes could prove to be extremely useful in representing the experience of displacement with more attention to its complexity. The visual presence of the threat, weapons, bombs, law enforcement and the apparatus of border regimes, techniques of control and surveillance and fences are important visual clues that, when included in images, help illustrate interconnections between the humanitarian situation of the people represented and wider socio-political dynamics. When NGOs’ pictures include these visual elements, as has been the case in some images discussed in the analytical chapters, the level of understanding of the situation of the image is particularly enhanced. When photos show the condition of distress together with the perpetrator, even its symbol, they are more likely to foster understanding of the context and reflection. As Sontag has affirmed, “the images that mobilize conscience are always linked to a given historical situation. The more general they are, the less likely they are to be effective” (Sontag 1973, 12). Similarly, the aesthetic patterns relating to everydayness, routine, and the various strategies through which people navigate the strange interplay between protracted ‘emergency’ and normalization – beyond the dominant rhetoric focused on humanitarian needs – can be very helpful in conveying the individuality, personal trajectories and diversity of experiences linked to displacement. Deploying a wider range of visual themes seems to be the best way to start representing refugees with a higher level of political agency. By visually including the causes of displacement, the perpetrators of violence, people’s political engagement, their grievances, protest and contestation, the mundane, their networks of solidarity and coping mechanisms NGOs could depict displaced Syrians in a more complex way, deconstructing an essentialized and de-politicized representation of threatened victims.

Obviously, a single image cannot include too many visual elements. How is it then possible to overcome this technical and conceptual challenge? One way lies in the visual or conceptual connection of images with each other. This can be simply achieved by including them in a specific photo gallery, making explicit the leitmotiv linking them. The expressive potentiality of this kind of medium can be significative in broadening understanding of refugees’ identities and experience beyond the humanitarian subject, thus offering wider information regarding the context of war and displacement. This can be achieved through photo galleries dedicated to various aspects of one individual’s personal experience of displacement, a sort of photo documentary able to offer a representation of the refugee’s identity beyond his/her immediate humanitarian need, which includes the causes of displacement. The analysis of the photo galleries of the four selected NGOs’ has not shown examples of such specific detailed focus on individuals. However, it has highlighted some examples of reportage which offer multiple visual perspective, such as the case of Oxfam’s Migrants Winter Walk (Oxfam 2016) or MSF’s Trapped at the EU Border (MSF 2016b). There are also extremely interesting communication examples of interactive webpages that allow the user to navigate through the different connected sections, photos, and text. An example is MSF’s Stay Alive – The Route from Syria to Europe website (MSF 2016a). Such kinds of communication project offer promise for they allow the inclusion of a wider set of visual topics to add complexity to the illustration and enhance understanding of what is happening on the ground. Although, of course, a certain level of abstraction and generalization is part of any form of visual representation which is intended as selective and interpretative action, the more themes and perspectives which can be added to the story the more comprehensive will be the depiction.

Capitalizing on these attempts to develop more complex and problematized visual narratives could allow NGOs’ representation of refugees to move beyond an essentialist and simplistic depiction in terms of humanitarian subjects and thus ultimately provide a more comprehensive portrayal of the complex realities of refugee displacement. Through these more inclusive forms of communication, we might perhaps glimpse the glimmers of an alternative discourse, able to challenge dominant and securitized forms of discourse on people on the move.