Framing the Syrian Refugee: Divergent Discourses in Three National Contexts

Focusing on the construction of the “refugee crisis” in mainstream daily newspapers in Sweden, Jordan, and Turkey in 2015, this chapter disentangles the crisis discourse into its specific components. Newspapers in the three countries focused on the “refugee crisis” as a source of concern for policy and politics at the local, national, and global levels. In comparing the discourses in the three contexts, despite their many differences, the analysis shows that the “refugee crisis” is constructed around uncertainties and inabilities to fathom the demands and consequences of such inflows of large numbers of people. Such uncertainties provide the basis on which a sense of moral, communal, or institutional crises become understood as a refugee crisis in different settings.