Coordinators

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gerhards (Freie Universität Berlin)                       

Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)

Prof. Dr. Marianne Braig (Freie Universität Berlin)

Researchers

Dr. Daniel Drewski (Freie Universität Berlin)

Research Questions

In the past years, the number of refugees and asylum seekers has increased substantially across the world. The UNHCR currently counts nearly 30 million persons in need of international protection, e.g. Syrians fleeing civil war, Rohingya escaping from religious violence in Myanmar, or people leaving the unstable situation in Venezuela. This has increased the pressure on destination countries to open up their borders to those seeking protection.

In principle, the liberal script offers two conflicting views whether immigrants should have access to another country. It grants nation states the right to control their borders in the name of collective self-determination, while also recognizing an individual's rights against arbitrary exclusion. With respect to the special group of refugees, however, the liberal script gives priority to the principle of the protection of the individual. According to international law, all countries are equally obliged not to push back refugees and asylum seekers and not to discriminate between them on the grounds of ethnicity, religion, origin etc.

In practice, however, countries vary widely in terms of their public discourses on refugees and asylum seekers, and the number and kinds of refugees they admit. This project aims to understand how the admission or rejection of refugees is legitimized in different countries by comparing the public discourses on refugees in six countries: Chile, Germany, Poland, Singapore, Turkey and Kenya or Uganda.

More specifically, we pursue two research questions:

a) We reconstruct the arguments, narratives and frames mobilized in public discourses to justify the admission or exclusion of forced migrants.

b) We attempt to explain differences in the framing of refugees between countries and within countries.

To answer these questions, we conduct a comparative qualitative discourse analysis of parliamentary debates. We complement the discourse analysis with interviews with key actors in the public sphere to understand their discursive strategies.

We argue that the variety of national discourses on the admission of refugees is primarily shaped by a country’s national self-understanding and how actors construct a nation’s collective identity. Accordingly, differences in the definition of one's own identity lead to differences in the definition of “otherness”.

Funding

This project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script”

Publications

Daniel Drewski & Jürgen Gerhards. 2024. Framing Refugees. How the Admission of Refugees is Debated in Six Countries Across the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drewski, Daniel & Jürgen Gerhards. 2024. Why do states discriminate between refugee groups? Understanding how Syrian and Ukrainian refugees were framed in Germany and Poland. American Journal of Cultural Sociology.

Drewski, Daniel & Jürgen Gerhards. 2024. Das liberale Skript und die Aufnahme von Flüchtlingen: Länderunterschiede in der Aufnahmepolitik und die Bedeutung nationaler kultureller Repertoires. Leviathan. Special edition ‚Zur Kritik des liberalen Skripts: Innere Spannungen, gebrochene Versprechen und die Notwendigkeit der Selbsttransformation‘, edited by Michael Zürn.

Drewski, Daniel & Jürgen Gerhards. 2024. The Liberal Border Script and Its Contestations: An Attempt at Definition and Systematization. In: The Liberal Script at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Conceptions, Components, and Tensions, edited by Tanja A. Börzel, Johannes Gerschewski and Michael Zürn. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Drewski, Daniel & Jürgen Gerhards. 2021. How refugees are interpreted in public debates in different countries: First results of a comparative project. Contribution to the Ad-Hoc-Group “Public Discourses on the Admission of Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Similarities and Differences between Countries”. In: Birgit Blättel-Mink (ed.): Gesellschaft unter Spannung. Verhandlungen des 40. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie 2020 (Online-Publication).

Drewski, Daniel/Gerhards, Jürgen 2020: The Liberal Border Script and its Contestations. An Attempt of Definition and Systematization, SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 4, Berlin: Cluster of Excellence 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS”.