Special section on discourse about the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border co-edited by GAPs team member, Mateusz Krępa from the CMR at the University of Warsaw
Pushbacks on the EU borders and the accompanying discourse are important aspects of return migration research. Horizon Europe GAPs team member in Poland, Mateusz Krępa from the Centre of Migration Research (CMR) at the University of Warsaw co-edited and published a special section on discourse about the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border in the "Migration Studies - Review of Polish Diaspora" journal. The special section consists of five papers.
In the opening, Mateusz Krępa and Nasim Ahamed Mondal depict how the main actors of the crisis - the migrants - are producers of the least discourse in this case. Consequently, the authors ask the question about the ethical dimension of the research on the crisis. Natalia Bloch touches on the issue of discursive imposition of hierarchies upon migration in the context of pushbacks, focusing on the intersection between gender, ethnicity, and citizenship. Ada Tymińska centers her analysis on age by asking how childhood is constructed within the narrative about migrants being forcibly returned to Belarus. Tymińska points to particular decisions by the dignitaries as the spaces in which the ground for various cases of abuse against people on the move is produced. Both these latter articles reflect on the imagination of “vulnerabilities” which are used to differentiate between “deserving” and “undeserving” refugees. Andrei Yeliseyeu analyzes how the Belarusian regime talks about the crisis it triggered and this constitutes an important contribution due to the scarcity of research on the agents managing irregular migration like smugglers or human traffickers. The author examines the official discourse produced by the Belarusian government-controlled media. The section is summarized by the reflection of Lidia Zessin-Jurek who asks how the crisis has been discursively normalized and what it tells about the responsibility of societies for return practices.
All papers can be found online in open access through the following link: