Description
Recent decades witnessed an increasing politicisation of refugee flows, with a growing debate on the role of international law and protection of refugees on the one hand and increasing trends of securitisation and externalisation of migration management on the other. Although there is growing scholarship on the topic, existing research is mostly focused on the European Union (EU) and its reaction to refugee flows, lacking a global perspective. Moreover, the current literature is mostly qualitative and often limited to brief periods. In a long-term and global investigation of this phenomenon, we ask: How do governments present the issue of refugee flows in a global arena such as the United Nations (UN)? More importantly, do they change their policy proposals as a function of where the refugees are originating from? Focusing on the annual sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, we focus on the long-term evolution (2000-2020) of the global debate on refugee flows. Based on Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), a mixed-methods technique that combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative social network analysis, on 630 speeches from the UN General Assembly, we show that the actor networks and proposed policies vary depending on the geographical location of the refugees. For instance, governments tend to use security framing when refugees come from Africa. We also identify a coalition of Oceanian governments advancing frames concerning climate change induced displacement. These findings have important implications for the relationship between the Global North and South.
