Disaster depictions and geopolitical representations in Europe's migration 'Crisis'.

Highlights • This paper evaluates geopolitical framing of migrants via European media sources. • Migrants were subject to 3 temporal representations linked to European geopolitics. • Escalation of depictions reveal prejudices that contradict alleged EU principles. Abstract This paper explores the geopolitical framing of migrants in Europe through an analysis of the discourse and imagery shared by both the mainstream and social media. Employing a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of material collated between January 2015 and December 2016, we suggest that migrants have been subject to three temporal representations that are linked to a European geopolitical vision of the world. While they were initially described as humans migrating into Europe, some parts of the media quickly equated the arrival of migrants with natural disasters, and then, finally, as geopolitical threats to security. This intensification of representations of migrants as the 'Other' and eventually as non-human threatening entities, reveals European geopolitical conceptualizations of belonging and sovereignty that are often at odds with the principles and values to which the European Union subscribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]