The migration–terrorism nexus: An analysis of German and Italian press coverage of the ‘refugee crisis’

Abstract

Over the last few years, terrorist attacks in European cities, together with the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, have (re)ignited a debate on whether there is an association between the two issues. Drawing on sociological approaches to risk and uncertainty, I claim that the discursive construction of causal linkages connecting refugees and migrants to terrorist activities is a fundamental passage in the process of social construction of migration as a threat. To identify the terrorism–migration linkages constructed in/through the media, this article examines the coverage of migration issues in two Italian and two German newspapers in 2015 and 2016, combining computer-assisted and qualitative content analysis. My findings reveal, firstly, how and in what circumstances the discourse on the terrorism threat is conflated with the discourse on migration. Then, the in-depth analysis of causal links in the coverage of four main terror attacks in Europe shows the predominance of a chain of causation linking terrorism to new migrants and refugees. Given the limited empirical research informing the debate over the migration–terrorism nexus, this study contributes to a better understanding of the process of social construction of migrants as threat objects.

Discursive construction of migrant otherness on Facebook: A distributional semantics approach

“…On the contrary, immigrant identities, it has been suggested, are constructed in such a way that a boundary between the Europeans and ‘criminal outsiders’ is created (Kreis, 2017). At the same time, the presence of immigrants was directly attributed to the terrorist threat to the host societies (Galantino, 2022). Some of the previous studies, however, have provided somewhat contradictory evidence that the refugee category was evaluated more negatively than the immigrant one (Findor et al, 2021).…”

Guest editorial

“…Research on migration flourishes (Samy and Duncan, 2021; Hassan et al , 2019; Galantino, 2020). The 2015–2016 refugee and migration crises that Europe was exposed to resonated in the international media, fuelling not only popular interest in migration but also the instrumentalization of migration (Visvizi, 2018; Brand, 2010).…”

Discursive construction of migrant otherness on Facebook: A distributional semantics approach

“…On the contrary, migrant identities, it has been suggested, are constructed in such a way that a boundary between the Europeans and "criminal outsiders" is created [14]. At the same time, the presence of migrants was directly attributed to the terrorist threat to the host societies [15]. Such a "categorical fetishism" has been argued to be a distinctive trait of the current European securitised immigration regime and discourse [16,17].…”