Geopolitics of mobile masses: refugee and tourist metaphors in Finnish-Russian bordertown media

Abstract

This paper examines the discourses on mobile others as objects of massification or likened to natural forces. By creating a dialogue between theories of crowds/masses and popular geopolitics, we examine how a local media frames the actual, imagined and absent border crossings of refugees and tourists when a voluminous mobile group disappears in tandem with an emerging unease about a new mobile group. We focus on the freesheet Imatralainen, published in a South Karelian Finnish-Russian bordertown that has been a tourist destination since the late eighteenth century but where invisible geopolitical tension is part of everyday life. Our discourse analysis shows that from the Crimean crisis to the migrant ‘crisis’ (2014–2016), local media have frequently portrayed Russian tourists and non-European migrants via a natural force rhetoric while viewing both refugees and tourists as potential resources or burdens. The mobility of others can represent itself as an external threat, and it can be taken as a perspectival threatscape that opens space for geopolitical issues amplified or transformed through the idea of masses and crowds into potential local issues. The article contributes to tourism geographies and the geopolitics of mobilities literature by evaluating the potential of classical crowd theories for understanding how threatscapes relating to the refugee-tourist nexus are made and manipulated by linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation. We argue that more attention should be given to the role of the local in shaping the popular geopolitics of mobilities that construct, sustain and fabricate discourses of ‘otherness’ and massification.

Keywords:

• Local media
• masses
• refugees
• tourism
• geopolitics
• natural force metaphors

Introduction

Discourses on human mobilities are fundamental to producing and understanding geopolitical imaginaries and social orderings as mobility practices make borders tangible (Bianchi et al., 2020; Fluri, 2023; Pfoser & Yusupova, 2022). ‘The long summer of migration’ (Kasparek & Speer, 2015) describes the reception of masses of asylum seekers on the move in Europe in 2015, extending into 2016. The media dubbed the event a migration or refugee ‘crisis’ due to its abruptness and magnitude, and it sought parallels in natural forces such as floods, surges and avalanches. The metaphorical act of comparing the actions of a group to a natural force estranges and others them (Taylor, 2021). It also translates feelings of powerlessness when facing out-of-control events uncommon in our socially resilient or engineered environments. Modern life can be surrounded by an industrially or technologically fixed nature, yet talking about human behaviour as a form of natural force or a mass to project geopolitical anxieties into local contexts can happen in disturbingly illogical ways.

Seen as a systemic problem, the ‘crisis’ has mainly been approached as a state-level, societal challenge, with local responses evading much of the research focus (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Laine, 2021; Stokes-Dupass, 2017). In this paper, we focus on Imatra, an old white-water tourist destination and a bordertown in Southeast Finland, to shed light on how ‘shocks’ of (im)mobility are nationally framed and locally discussed. First, the economic sanctions towards Russia after the unlawful annexation of Crimea (Koch & Vainikka, 2019) all but plummeted the number of Russian tourists visiting the Finnish borderland, which significantly affected the regional economies. The figure for nights in registered accommodations in South Karelia by Russians dropped from the 2013 peak of 350,000 to 144,000 in 2015, being in free fall from February 2014 to September 2016 (StatFin, 2023). After being accustomed to and investing in the steady inflow of tourists since the 2000s, the oversized tourism service supply became a concern for economic insecurity (Laine, 2017; Prokkola, 2019b). Second, in 2015–2016, Finland and many other European countries received record numbers of asylum seekers. Approximately 38,100 people applied for asylum after arriving at the Finnish borders. The main point of arrival was at the Swedish-Finnish border; under five per cent of migrants took the ‘Arctic route’ from northern Russia, and only a handful passed the Karelian border crossing points (Virkkunen & Piipponen, 2021). In South Karelia and country-wide, reception centres and emergency accommodations were established, and many communities provided relief for the first time (Prokkola, 2020).

As a place, Imatra is defined by the fierce but harnessed rapid on the Vuoksi, Lake Saimaa, a welcoming atmosphere and the border. Yet, everyday life is conditioned by a historically salient but invisible geopolitical tension, making South Karelia in general an intriguing testbed for analysing shifts in the geopolitics of mobilities. The functionality of the border, as one of the most securitised in Europe, is an indicator of EU-Russia relations. Yet, when a voluminous group of Russian tourists shrank in tandem with an emerging and mobile group of unknown refugees, a whirlwind of discourses of the ‘other’ were generated especially in the media. While the region houses different forms of cross-border mobility (Kaisto, 2017), from dual citizens and industrial commuters to Finnish gasoline refuellers and Russian second-home owners, only tourist masses and migration flows were framed as crises during the timeframe.

The long-standing interest in popular geopolitics has focussed on how popular culture and media construct, communicate and manipulate geographical politics (Dittmer & Gray, 2010; Ó Tuathail, 1999). A key concern for this paper at the refugee-tourist nexus is how rhetoric and metaphors are used to make sense of large numbers of securitised refugees (Deleixhe et al., 2019; Mountz, 2015; Prokkola, 2020) and classed tourists (Butcher, 2017, 2020). In effect, such nexus, or a link between mobilities, is accentuated through the welcoming structures of the hosts (Choe & Lugosi, 2022), in media that massificates the mobile other and in the threatscapes of, especially, the populist discourses. We analyse an example of a local media freesheet, Imatralainen, mainly as a discursive but also as a material and affective ‘border environment’. Flirting with the idea of a populist ‘counter-media’, this freesheet, especially its editorials, stood out from the mainstream media. Targeting a different readership than, for example, the yellow press (see Kotilainen, 2021; Laine, 2019, 2021), the freesheet can be a ‘default’ media for locals not requiring a subscription. As such, Imatralainen can extend ideas of geopolitical efficacy since it could influence perceptions at and from the border. Furthermore, analysing local media highlights migration and mobility not as flows or tracts between states (van Houtum & Bueno Lacy, 2020) but as local responses to and stimuli drawn from shared discourses. Imatralainen opened space for emotionally engaging and even provocative journalism in its description of geopolitical threats, fears and challenges to entice readership.

Imatralainen openly welcomed provocatively negative and stigmatising writings on refugees and tourists that would otherwise, according to the freesheet, ‘be censored in the other local media Uutis-Vuoksi’. It provides an example of the production of borderland geopolitical threatscapes. In geography, landscapes encompass a visual, real or figurative register of spatial surroundings constructed from a certain point or in movement (Wylie, 2007). With threatscape, we refer to the echoes of problems recognised from a distance or elsewhere that are amplified or transformed into potential local issues. Thus, the term enables us to analyse how the geopolitics of fear (Pain, 2010) are constructed and produced without assuming that such threats, especially concerning othering or masses, are widely felt at a collective level. The term, like other ‘scapes’, including borderscapes (Brambilla, 2015), is a ‘deeply perspectival construct’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). While the term has been used in digital forensics and criminology (Kindynis, 2014), threatscape as a conceptual tool underlines the construction or condensation of popular geopolitical threats and the unknown, such as masses, for an imagined audience without necessarily contextualising them.

Before moving to the empirical research on the othering and (de)bordering of migrants and tourists in South Karelia, the paper theorises metaphors of mass movement and deliberates the methodology. It then discusses how the discourses on an ‘othered’ movement—involuntary migration and leisure mobilities—can be both welcoming and unwelcoming and may affect the atmosphere among the readership.

Geopolitical repercussions: portraying tourism and forced migration mobilities

Tourism and migration occupy research fields, even though hospitality and welcoming others, tourists, migrants and refugees alike, can share similar processes (Choe & Lugosi, 2022; V. Vainikka & Vainikka, 2018), bordering practices and politics (Timothy & Gelbman, 2022). These mobilities are geopolitically relevant and culturally interlinked phenomena that shape local and regional communities (Laine, 2017). We claim that as attitudinal stances towards the mobile other, migration talk like McCabe’s (2005, p. 102) ‘tourist talk’ are ‘fundamental frames of discourse through which to analyse contemporary social mores and moral concerns’. The ways in which substantial ‘volumes’ of migration get politicised and securitised affect how migration and mobility are framed (Mountz, 2015; Stokes-Dupass, 2017).

Certain value-laden connotations, like ‘asylum tourism’ or ‘lifestyle migration’, are suggestive of a superficial migration where political human rights and fear are turned into economic opportunism that rhetorically depreciates the right to asylum (Kotilainen & Pellander, 2022). Hinting at the pejorative and abusive way (mass) tourists are often spoken of, the notion of mass serves as a metaphor for destruction, superficiality, excess and even being morally wrong (Butcher, 2017, 2020; McCabe, 2005; V. Vainikka, 2013). By studying the metaphors informing such migrant and tourist mass mobilities, within a media-constructed threatscape, it is possible to understand the continuous processes of (de)bordering between or the formulation of us and others (J. T. Vainikka, 2020) and what is considered morally acceptable cross-border mobilities (Paasi et al., 2019). We use the verbs bordering and debordering (see van Houtum & van Naerssen, 2002) to highlight both the symbolic and material processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Gillen and Mostafanezhad (2019, p. 71) note that ‘the tourism encounter is place-based, multi-scalar and politically mediated geopolitical experience that is co-constituted by residents and tourists’. The intensification of such encounters, as well as increasing migration, have increased attention on how they are framed and welcomed (Cristiano & Gonella, 2020), as the failures of tourism or cultural clashes are often indicative of geopolitical imaginaries about tourist-resident encounters (Pfoser & Yusupova, 2022; Wu, 2017). While we take care not to conflate tourists and migrants, there are evident geopolitical repercussions from their mobilities. Populism increasingly uses fear and anxiety as material for geopolitical imaginaries about the ‘massified’, othered or uncontrollable tourism (Ahmed, 2003; Screti, 2022), as well as migration mobilities, which supposedly threaten issues ranging from ecological carrying capacity to national identities (Choe & Lugosi, 2022; Zekan et al., 2022). For example, Romanogli (2021) uses the word ‘tsunami’ to describe overtourism in Barcelona. He acknowledges the paradox between economic benefit and the fear of losing identity but seems uncritical towards describing the influx of tourists as ‘tsunamis’.

Both media and migration studies have demonstrated that applying massification or natural force metaphors can frame immigrants and refugees in negative, inhumanising or dehumanising ways (e.g. Pugh, 2004; Taylor, 2021). Numerous examples illustrate how the media throughout Europe framed the ‘migration crisis’ using natural force rhetoric and referenced to massification (e.g. Arcimaviciene & Baglama, 2018; Chouliaraki, 2017; Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Montagut & Moragas-Fernández, 2020). The same is evident in Finnish quality media (Horsti, 2021; Martikainen & Sakki, 2021), tabloids (Kotilainen, 2021; Laine, 2021) and alternative media alike (Tuomola, 2018). Such framing contributed to the polarisation of debates that ran parallel in mainstream media and on social media platforms (Pöyhtäri et al., 2021; Watts & Rothschild, 2017).

While previous research has mainly been focussed on how migrant groups are metaphorically represented in the media as an othered mass, the same is not the case in tourism. Research on host perceptions in newspapers is well established, but a need to investigate the media’s role in framing tourists remains (Gurova & Ratilainen, 2016). Though recent tourism research has, to some extent, engaged in critical discussions or ethical awakenings on portraying tourist masses (Butcher, 2017, 2020; Obrador Pons et al., 2009), the media nevertheless continues to frame tourism mainly through host community attitudes. We argue that it remains important to look past the numbers when overtourism is discussed in the media (e.g. Phi, 2020; Screti, 2022), as critical analyses of the representations of tourists in masses and overtourism are still limited (Hammett, 2014; Mayer et al., 2021).

Part of the problem is that the media employs the metaphor of the mass in seemingly natural and objective ways, meaning that its very inconspicuousness makes it powerful (Laine, 2021). That said, what space (if any) is there for humane, emphatic understandings in the popular representations constructing human mass mobility (cf. Montagut & Moragas-Fernández, 2020; Vaughan-Williams, 2015)? We argue that connecting massification and metaphors of natural forces with the practices of (de)bordering space opens a socio-spatial perspective where spatial encounters, belonging and rights are both territorial and relational. In terms of local media, where local stories and produced threatscapes encounter one another, it becomes crucial to argue for geopolitically sensitive interpretations that prioritise questions of who speaks, from what platform, and to whom, and who are silenced.

Bordering through massification: linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation

We use crowds and masses as analytically interchangeable terms since both crowds and masses can share a space or participate in collective behaviour that is recognisable outside such conglomerations. While crowds can be exemplified through their assembling in space (Borch, 2015, 61), they can also share an interest in and be formed through media (Lemos, 2010). The way we frame groups of affected people informs their potential action and conditions their observers. As Borch (2012, p. 13) states, ‘when people describe themselves and others in crowd and mass terms, this is likely to have performative effects on their subsequent behaviour’. Talking about crowds and masses both reflects reality and creates performed encounters.

Following Vaughan-Williams (2015), Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (2017) identified three mutually inclusive linguistic ‘bordering’ practices for describing refugees in 2015: silencing, collectivisation and de-contextualisation. For them, the ‘symbolic bordering’ of journalism ‘works in tandem with Europe’s territorial borders’ (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 615). We develop this bordering framework further by applying it to massification and natural rhetoric practices. While (de)bordering is commonly used in refugee and migration studies to conceptualise the nature of borders, we transplant the framework into the tourism context since it will help address the role of media in othering, silencing or giving a voice to mobile crowds and masses.

First, crowds and masses are the results of linguistic collectivisation and aggregation (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Khrosravinik, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2015), where quantification can strip people of their individuality (Soto-Almela & Alcaraz-Mármol, 2019). Refugees can become ‘a statistical percentage, as part of a mass of unfortunates, where one is indistinguishable from another’ (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 616), or is projected as ‘one unanimous group’ with related backgrounds, motivations, objectives and class (Khrosravinik, 2010, 13). Using verbs such as ‘to pack’ and nouns like ‘masses’ (Arcimaviciene & Baglama, 2018) to objectify people also contributes to the process of aggregating groups of people into discourses of threat (Martikainen & Sakki, 2021). Representations of anonymous masses can eradicate personal histories (Nyers, 1999), prevent encounters as human beings or impede empathetic portrayals of hardships, crossings and recreation. In the evolution of mass tourism, from the image of a working-class tourist and democratisation of tourism to various forms of mass consumption (Butcher, 2017), a consistent theme has been the lack of individual agency and an emphasis on crowd behaviour (Butcher, 2020; V. Vainikka, 2013) following an early sociological strand that ‘an individual in a crowd is a grain of sand […] which the wind stirs up at will’ (Le Bon, 1896, p. 13) without agency (cf. Tarde, 1901). Conflating differences among people as a mass in media helps to construct a border between the audience and the represented. When the bordering practices estrange the mass, it becomes easier to use natural force rhetoric to explain behaviour en masse. Loss of individual agency and manipulation by an outside force are apparent in the narrow view of crowds adopted by classic crowd theories (Borch, 2012). The notion of individuals being shaped into a collectively behaving mass mind has been proved scientifically flawed, criticised and found insufficient for understanding an individual’s experiences of crowds (Borch, 2013; Rickly, 2019).

Second, massification contributes to silencing (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Quite often, readers view masses as victims or threats that engender controversial imaginaries or whose voices are weakened, as if one did not have to talk with them but only manage and control them through physical measures. Masses can be class-based victims, movements for rights and freedom, or a threatful mob with different degrees of agency. Masses and crowds have been, in sociological terms, seen more as risks than solutions for modern society (Borch, 2012). The echoes of the Saint-Simonian idea of the ‘idle class’ as a form of unpredictable mass behind social unrest (Jacoud & Potier, 2020) are still recognisable in the ways many people understand or disregard the motivations of the masses. When masses of refugees are framed in terms of victimhood (Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017), the ‘passivization is manifested in depictions of the refugee as vulnerable body-in-pain’ (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 616), and the mass is stripped of efficacy (Martikainen & Sakki, 2021) or devalued into an economic burden (Soto-Almela & Alcaraz-Mármol, 2019). Territorial politics has long designated normalcy and political agency for citizens and abnormality and emptied identities for refugees (Nyers, 1999).

Third, massification naturalises dehumanisation when people are referred to as an out-of-control phenomenon or as a kind of devastating natural disaster (Arcimaviciene & Baglama, 2018; Kotilainen, 2021; Soto-Almela & Alcaraz-Mármol, 2019) that does not stop at the state border. In many portrayals, mass tourists are dehumanised into robot-like consumers thought to be programmed to behave without diversity (Butcher, 2020). When attention is directed away of human relations, such a process can be interpreted as de-contextualisation (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Vaughan-Williams, 2015). Refugees, for instance, can be constructed as an out-of-control mass, pests, potential intruders or a ‘potentially unstoppable mass’ (Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017; Lazović, 2017, p. 204). Like Pugh (2004, pp. 54–55) states metaphors like flooded, engulfed, swamped or words like wave or flow help construct ‘debates around people on the move as impersonal, highly destructive and destabilizing societies’ (see also Laine, 2021; Parker, 2015). Thus, metaphors can create a sense of insecurity and even panic among the public (Arcimaviciene & Baglama, 2018). Pugh (2004, p. 55) continues that references to uncontrollable water may serve to skew or obscure considerations of human responsibility and the ethical concerns around hospitality. The dominant European representations used in 2015–2016 gave the impression of an incessant flow of people heading towards Europe regardless of national borders (Mainwaring, 2016; van Houtum & Bueno Lacy, 2020). However, previous research on mass tourists has not focussed on natural force metaphors in the media, except for Romanogli (2021), who, to some extent, focusses on the metaphor of tourist tsunamis to underline the disruptive power of the other. The way researchers described mass tourists in the 1970s spoke about fears of an uncontrollable, destructive mass. They were framed as golden hordes or hordes of barbarians in search of superficial experiences at pleasure peripheries, destroying the unique and seemingly authentic culture in their wake (Turner & Ash, 1975). Lately, the debate on (over)tourism has raised more interest in the mediatisation of tourism and how media constructs the idea of an ‘invasion’ of them tourists (Cristiano & Gonella, 2020), but also conveys a sense of shame for communities of being dependent on the tourist other (Prokkola & Ridanpää, 2017). We highlight that de-contextualisation feeds into different ways of controlling, managing and reacting to crowds of refugees (Laine, 2021) and tourists. The use of natural force metaphors does not automatically build negative representations of refugees, immigrants (Khrosravinik, 2010), or tourists, as the interpretation is dependent on the interpretative context and the scope of the crisis.

Context, methodology and methods

Local bordering practices and geopolitical perceptions of national and European scope were commonplace in the freesheet Imatralainen. As part of the centre-right mainstream publisher Keskisuomalainen, it was part of the media apparatus with established audiences and official local-tier informants. Unlike the regional papers Uutis-Vuoksi or Etelä-Saimaa, it is a ‘default’ media, a paper that can be read without a subscription and available in public spaces. Established to provide a competing voice to the other local media, Imatralainen was discontinued in January 2020.

Imatralainen operated in an industrial town that has been a touristic destination since the late eighteenth century, where the legacies of different boundaries condition the imaginaries of the region. Different generations have diverging emotional narratives of the border (Laurén, 2012), resulting in inherited perceptions of and experienced changes in the attitudes towards ‘the other’ across the border. Paasi (2016, p. 25) feels that the ‘violence, wars, and threat represented by Russia/Soviet Union have in general been critical in shaping national narratives related to independence’, even to the point that the region is fetishised through the border nationally. The ‘stickiness’ of histories of fear, trauma and indifference also controls ‘the relation between the objects that are feared’ (Ahmed, 2003, p. 389), where stories, memories and nostalgia are told differently, but living in a region where the border had been virtually closed for decades does not necessarily imply that regional awareness would be based on the border. The cultural literacy of a sensitive border, plus the experiences and knowledge of cross-border interaction and tourism, explains some of the attitudes of people towards the other. South Karelia carries on some legacies of the lost Karelian Isthmus, where nostalgia for a spatially continuous heritage has for long made the relationship over the border complex (J. T. Vainikka, 2015). The border is a strictly securitised external border of the EU and seems to be more critical for non-local imaginaries of the region than for actual identities. According to a survey study of residents of Lappeenranta and Tornio (Finnish-Swedish border), most of the respondents from Lappeenranta reported having never crossed the border into Russia, whereas for the respondents from Tornio, entering Sweden is a mundane practice (Prokkola, 2019a).

Successful regional and local media reflects and informs the perceptions of people without the need to sensationalise or clickbait titles (Greussing & Boomgaarden, 2017; Laine, 2019, 2021). Imatralainen, as a regularly delivered freesheet, continued to have an impact on the border environment, but we cannot state conclusively here that its message was widely accepted. The data for this article includes semi-weekly editorials, journalistic articles, opinion pieces and columns extending from August 2015 until the end of September 2017. The timeframe starts from the beginning of the large-scale arrival of involuntary migrants to Finland and ends two years later—a month after a terrorist attack in Turku, Finland. Each issue was scanned, and all articles referring to the border, security, migration, refugees and tourism were tabulated based on their titles and ingresses. The articles were read and the data for this research were then selected based on whether the pieces used the rhetoric of natural forces or mass, resulting in 64 separate texts. Texts addressing tourism were published throughout the timeframe, but the bulk of the migration-related writings occurred within the first six months. The material was analysed using discourse analysis. The different categories of language use, that is, collectivisation, silencing and de-contextualisation, are understood here as discursive framings producing a media threatscape and, to an extent, reflecting collective understandings. The quotations used in this paper are translated from Finnish by the authors.

Three editors steered the editorial line of Imatralainen: Karri Kannala (in 2015), Janne Koivisto (in late 2015–2016) and Riina Haapala (in 2017). While each had different styles and strategies, all underlined the freedom of opinion without censorship. Kannala, for instance, wished for more diverse discussions around refugees and automobility, welcoming perceived antipodes without stigmatisation (interview in Journalisti, Marttinen, 2019). The editors yielded a degree of geopolitical agency and power when selecting topics worthy of discussion and providing guidelines on what kind of rhetoric would be allowed in the media. Karri Kannala’s role was the most visible since he continued to write substituting editorials even after his editorship as manager of the newspaper family. The empirical analysis of the discursive mobility crises and produced threatscapes is structured in two parts: first, we examine the discursive framings of the media narratives on refugees, and second, we focus on the narratives of tourism, contextualising them with existing research on borderland regions.

Refugee discourses: ‘disastrous’ crowds

In Imatralainen, the mass of refugees is represented as an invading, animalistic herd or an ‘out-of-control mass’ threatening to take over. Collectivisation, silencing and de-contextualisation work together to frame the crowds. In a recurring editorial, entitled ‘Immigrant soup is boiling over’,¹ Kannala writes: ‘What is going on with the refugee masses in Europe is starting to resemble more the streets of the Middle East with each passing day: bombs are banging and crowds yelling and swarming’. The apparent reference to the imagined and destructive behaviour of the othered crowd enforces the idea that the mass threatens social order. The European situation is uncritically brought to the local discursive landscape, where the formation of the unknown masses is turned into a battlefield by claiming how the projected ‘majority’ will take a stand and object to the limited debates and general accommodating atmosphere in the media. Kannala continues² by saying that ‘discouraging debate will not work out for long, for the majority of the population will rise to the parricades (sic.) when reception centres similar to Kirkkonummi start to open up in your own neighbourhood because of the floods of refugees’. The situation where the imagined ‘minorities’ threat to overrun the ‘traditional ways’ of the ‘majority of the Finns’ becomes framed not only as a battle against the arriving mass but also against mainstream media journalists and leftist politics in a populist manner (Wojczewski, 2020). Neither the battlefield nor natural disaster framings serve to forward mutual understanding or dialogue central to democracy (Watts & Rothschild, 2017).

Several editorials in 2015 sparked interest and responses from readers in the form of published opinion letters. Some were directly inspired and encouraged by the editorials to continue addressing the refugee situation critically with the same vocabulary, forming collectively acceptable discourse and actions. Here we argue against the argument made by Dittmer and Gray (2010, p. 1664) that ‘powerful actors shape discourse, which then descends upon the masses to ensnare them’. The mass audience is not just a passive receiver; it consists of variegated worldviews, which affect whether such outlets are read, how the narratives used are understood and how they are retold and acted upon in social life. Local media can also become a site of struggle over different voices as locals write letters to the editor. The journalists affect public opinion, but their aim of pleasing their audiences gives the public efficacy over the journalist. Although wide-ranging discussion and debate would be encouraged, most of the responses were critical of migration and supported the views of the editor, using right-wing acronyms to shape collectively acceptable discourse. This responsive discussion stops with the change of the editor, but Kannala’s recurrent editorial writing nonetheless keeps up the connection.

Most of the writings that massificate or use natural force rhetoric are critical of the situation and victimise the Finns instead of the refugees and reflect insecurities. The movement of the refugees, regardless of their origin, is framed as an out-of-control mass and an imagined other bringing only chaos: ‘People have fled in masses from the Middle East, they have been allowed to cross borders illegally and to bring the war here with them’. This excerpt, from a political PS-affiliated opinion piece,³ underlines a distrust in international law and the perceived failure of the European Union’s borders while naturalising war in the Middle East, making it resemble an epidemic. There are several references to mobility and state borders in the material that decontextualise refugees as a natural force: ‘Unidentified people are flowing over our borders from the Middle East’⁴ and ‘the mass is advancing like a lava flow towards the borders of Germany trying to find the smallest obstacle’.⁵ Some of the writings, like a piece by a former border guard, evoke the threat of the Russian masses coming across the border after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It frames the borderlands as the victims of the first surges. Naturalising the refugee masses to have negative effects on Finns was a central point in both opinion pieces and several journalistic articles.

The controversial nature of silencing is transparent as the mass is not framed as the ultimate threat but instead as containing groups of terrorists, sexual offenders, war fugitives or criminals. The mass becomes a disguise that hides threats in the form of silenced refugees: ‘Unfortunately, there are con artists among the mass of refugees’.⁶ The mass is used as a smokescreen for individual conmen, but with it comes the portrayal of an abled and gendered crowd where suspicion becomes multiplied. According to Kannala, ‘based on official statistics, 70% of asylum seekers are men, most of them in good health and at the age of military service’.⁷ The gendered and morally suspect ‘wrong’ crowd of refugees stems from a possible misunderstanding of the nature of conflict and as a self-reflection to masculine military service in Continental Finland. A discernible section of writings reflects on the traumas of the Second World War, as refugees are condemned as war fugitives who should be fighting for and building their ‘homeland’, making it clear that the threatscape is more about discontent than fear. The real threat is the conmen or men seen as aliens: ‘The refugee families do not engender near as much fear as those herds of young male refugees’.⁸ The anxiety towards young foreign men was put in a new light in December 2016, when a young local man from Imatra with previous violent mental health problems randomly shot dead three women in the centre of Imatra. When fear, discontent, origins and ethnicity are opened up, layers and genders in the perceived homogeneity of the mass become more visible.

Short news stories and journalistic articles apply the natural force rhetoric in a seemingly neutral manner. This practice decontextualises the movements of refugees but also inhumanises their individual agency. However, the references to crowd management, potential masses and ‘controllable crowds or masses’ and reports on the actions of the Border Guard invariably reassured readers that the situation was under control. For example, one news article explicitly states that ‘the Border Crossing Point of Nuijamaa assists the West Finland Coast Guard District in managing the refugee flows coming to Tornio’.⁹ This translates into the same kind of engineering control for which the Imatra Rapid is known. The situational monitoring, management, care and control of simultaneous, unexpected mobilities of large numbers of people can be important for a sense of safety locally (Prokkola, 2020). The challenge for media resides in not silencing or reducing people to faceless flows in the narratives of border control and in considering how such actions affect individuals.

Tourist discourses: critical consumer mass

The analysis focusses on a period after 2014, when the impact of the sanctions on Russia over the annexation of Crimea started to show in the South Karelia tourism economy. Compared with the threatscapes of the masses of refugees and migrants, the threat posed by the mass in this instance is not the ‘flow’ of people but the absence of tourist masses and consuming crowds. It took the form of titles like ‘The low point in the number of Russian tourists met’,¹⁰ and editors urging the local community to learn from the crisis:

The absence of Russians has continued for over a year. By now, even those South Karelians who were complaining about queues in the shops start to understand that the folk and the money flowing from the Eastern neighbour is vital to us.¹¹

Massification by natural force rhetoric is mainly used in editorials and journalistic articles by both journalists and interview practitioners, indicating a normalised way of speaking about tourists as an economic phenomenon. The controversial nature of tourist mobility as both a resource and a threat are evident. In editorials urging for more acceptance of Russian tourists, it is not so much the Russians themselves but the importance of their economic effect on ‘us’ that matters. Meanwhile, the locals are passivised/silenced into an accepting audience in these narratives: ‘Luring in big masses of tourists requires co-operation [.] and making the Lake Saimaa brand known would be easier if everybody would stick together without the thought that this is our playground’.¹² It is not only the masses out there that have agency, but locals that need to put the effort in, too. The crisis based on the absence of masses and wishes for collaboration among practitioners shifts the discussion towards de-bordering, in contrast with the previous discourses on migration. The editorial openings do not result in any crowd reactions in the form of readers’ opinion pieces.

The realisation of how important (Russian) tourists are to the region is wrapped in a collectivised, romanticised version of the near past: ‘Until 2014, everything ran like a dance: the number of Russians grew, and new flows of tourists arrived in South Karelia from Finland as well as from Europe’.¹³ The editorials further depict the locals as being able to organise gatherings: ‘For decades, Imatra has had the skill to arrange mass events’.¹⁴ During the peak years of Russian tourism in 2013–2014, hardly any articles in the newspaper focussed on them or tourists in general. Elsewhere in the newspaper, though, writings express suspicion towards Russians and their behaviour (see Prokkola, 2019a). In their study on the long-term portrayal of Russian tourists in the Finnish media, Gurova and Ratilainen (2016) found that the discourse changed from stories about rising middle-class Russian tourists who benefit the Finnish economy to a narrative highlighting the challenges that Russian societal problems cause to the Finnish economy. While Russians had long been massified and mystified in the Finnish press, the collapse of Russian short-term tourism increased an understanding of the importance of tourism as a resource in Finnish Karelia (Prokkola, 2019b).

It becomes clear that even though Russians were facing economic and social turmoil, it is ‘us’ who are framed as victims. Thus, the masses or flows of tourists and visitor numbers need to be secured and controlled. Due to the vulnerability related to Russian tourism, the media gaze gradually shifted to potential Asian masses and markets elsewhere: ‘We have to tap into the flow of Chinese tourists’, noted one regional expert.¹⁵ Part of the anxiety relates to the on-off relation of Lappeenranta Airport with air traffic: ‘The airport is crucial for the accessibility of the Lake Saimaa region and for securing tourist flows, especially when the flow of travellers from Russia is at least momentarily low’.¹⁶ It becomes clear that for a borderland region, smooth tourism mobilities and border practices go hand in hand so that growth does not happen without investments in capacity, infrastructure and geopolitical relations: ‘An entrepreneur fears that a slow border crossing will decrease the flow of customers’ is the title of one such article.¹⁷ The capacity of the Border Guard and Customs could help ensure smooth cross-border tourism mobilities, though in the case of refugees, the newspaper had asked that they do the opposite. By highlighting the agency of tourism entrepreneurs and the Border Guard, tourists are silenced not through being assigned the role of victim or villain but as someone who ‘we’ depend on as a resource. As the EU’s external border is on the ‘doorstep’ of those reading Imatralainen, the newspaper closely and repeatedly follows the filtering and securitising of the mobility flow from Russia to Finland in weekly published reports on any border or customs violations.

At first, the mass as an aggregate is framed as the most important part of the story, but a further distinction is also made by defining some as ‘better crowds’. Mass events represent hope for the future: ‘There are no firms that would not benefit from the event. When the masses of people are on the move, the week and the weekend are really good for business’.¹⁸ The newspaper underlines how much local businesses will benefit from such crowds, but these narratives can be seen as part of an effort to persuade locals to accept temporary disturbances. In most cases, the masses symbolise anyone, and the larger the crowd, the better: ‘Imatran Yöt seeks even larger masses’, exclaimed one headline.¹⁹ However, some are more welcome than others in cross-border tourism, implying that ‘the goal of marketing is not a low-margin mass tourism, but rather the experienced Chinese traveller’.²⁰ Even though the term quality is not used here, the refusal to engage in ‘low-margin tourism’ underscores a focus on wealthier tourists instead of the ‘low-class masses’ (Butcher, 2020; Wu, 2017), further highlighting the individuality or segmentation of travellers into better and worse crowds. While the newspaper continuously focusses on the number of tourists visiting the region, tourists who are more experienced are preferred, according to tourism practitioners.

Conclusions; understanding the tourist-refugee nexus

Local media can construct and echo the experiences and fears of the geopolitics of mobilities. This study has investigated how a local media in a border environment applies natural force rhetoric about the massification of refugees and tourism. By examining the produced threatscape through linguistic collectivisation, silencing and dehumanisation of ‘mobile masses’, our study complicates a clear distinction between tourists as ‘wanted/welcomed mobilities’ and refugees as ‘unwanted mobilities’ (Bianchi et al., 2020; Paasi et al., 2019). We have demonstrated that tourism mobilities, too, can be conceived as problematic. Masses threaten ideas of local identities or are discursively framed as an inhumane economic resource or a source of vulnerability. Mobile masses are not only about numbers but also about who they are and how they relate to the heritage and anticipations of the local community. The invisible geopolitical tension in South Karelia is part of the construction of the threatscape of the masses. Young men escaping war can easily be seen as the wrong kind of refugees, whereas the influx of Russian tourists frequently engenders bitterness, silences or fear from the past. Mass mobilities can present itself as being ‘out-of-control’, which means that research should contextualise the relational practices involved in the massification of movement akin to natural forces as individual stories and behaviour are all too often forgotten when talking about masses. Both tourism and refugee mobilities cause friction in the local landscape that pushes social resilience, and this paper offered an analysis of the consecutive (dis)appearance of mobility in the tourist-refugee nexus.

The use of natural force rhetoric can mobilise a threatscape, a narrative of external threats recognised from a distance or elsewhere to produce local concern. Such a threatscape engenders emotions and pushes the readership or local community to get involved in debate (see Pain, 2010). Massification intensifies and dramatises the imaginary threatscape, obscures the scales of threat and the possibilities for local or national communities to manage them. Such logics can be employed both by tabloids and the visible media (Laine, 2019, 2021; Romagnoli, 2021; Taylor, 2021), where the rhetoric associated with natural forces accentuates the difference between ‘us’, or the readership, and ‘the others’, described as an undifferentiated mass making the other a condition of the ‘self’ (J. T. Vainikka, 2020). Such comparisons are seldom in tune with local experiences. Harnessing, regulating and agreeing upon the flows of the Vuoksi and the Imatra Rapid exemplifies how the movements of a large mass can be controlled. The history of the secure border and the engineered natural force are such dominant factors among the readership of Imatralainen that it would seem hard to argue for a threatscape of uncontrollable masses, but surprisingly, the paper never drew any analogies between the romanticised rapid and the ‘long summer of migration’ nor does it refer to the empty gorge next to the hydropower plant as a metaphor to the dried-up flow of Russian tourists. While the mobile other is often likened to flowing water (Laine, 2021), such rhetoric does not have a local referent. Furthermore, the secured border resulted in South Karelia perhaps being the last place to witness a flood of refugees. For that reason, the use of the term threatscape becomes an example of a ‘deeply perspectival’ (Appadurai, 1996) practice of populism or a sense of threat that is blind to the local context of mastering actual natural forces.

Treating crowds and masses as natural forces can both work to destabilise social order and promote its vitality. The facelessness of refugees and tourists in local media silences them, decontextualises their stories, experiences, fears and hopes and dehumanises their impact. As our analysis shows, it is not only the refugees or tourists who are represented as masses, since the general population is projected as a rejecting mass or are given instructions to accept the importance of tourist crowds. Massification is discursively used to represent us and them and to mobilise readers, but the strategy yields rather biased participation and creates an atmosphere of threat, fear or obedience. Borch (2015) has shown that masses can be portrayed as both representations of others (Williams, 1990, p. 300) and tangible formations. By distinguishing between the mobilisation of crowds and the representation of crowds, Borch (2015) argues for a politics of the crowds involving a strategic attempt to ‘mould crowd support’ (Borch, 2015, p. 57). Thus, the media can simultaneously seek to mobilise crowds and use massification as a discursive technique of othering that may affect attitudes.

Even though natural force rhetoric de-contextualises transnational mobility shocks (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017; Horsti, 2021; Vaughan-Williams, 2015) as part of the discursive threatscape, it becomes, in an affectual and ambiguous way, a part of the border environment and thus relationally spatialised. Framing masses as natural forces or as threats dehumanises others and associates the rhetorics of war and disasters with crowd behaviour. But there is another kind of interpretation as well: the masses serve as a smokescreen for bad refugees, conmen, potential criminals and terrorists—figures that stigmatise the othered masses. This boundary is more visible as a gender division since men represent a threat while children, women and the ageing are mere victims. The media performs the role of judge, assigning itself the task of drawing the line between and defining the good and the bad. In the case of tourists, the local media took the narrative to another extreme: masses symbolising hope because of their economic benefits—no questions asked—with the threat realised being the absence of the masses. However, this narrative still exposes tension since the cultural-historical relationship with Russians has been complicated, and thus, readers need to be convinced that they should put aside their sometimes deep-rooted negativity (Laurén, 2012; Pfoser & Yusupova, 2022).

In South Karelia, the symbolic and material dimensions of bordering are present in people’s everyday lives (Kaisto, 2017). In our material, the natural force rhetoric was much more normalised in professional tourism talk. In contrast, in terms of refugees, the narratives provided by editors and readers reacting to their stories were more provocative. In addition, bordering does not only occur between ‘us’, the Finns, and ‘others’, whether they are tourists or immigrants, but also between humanitarian and nationalist thoughts riding on fears and victimisation of the Finns and fuelled by biased news linking (Pöyhtäri et al., 2021) and algorithmic bubbles (Watts & Rothschild, 2017). In times of crises, small local media can more easily become more rogue and populist in its journalistic style, pushing forward general threat imaginaries. Other regional media or freesheets would not have published letters to editors with such a language and their editorial line would have been more neutral. Provocative and more humanistic texts were published in Imatralainen that underline the polarised stances around mobilities.

One dimension of the debate is the heavily concentrated media and what (political) groups have the means to make their voices heard (Fluri, 2023; Kotilainen & Pellander, 2022; Lazović, 2017). The unease towards the waning tourist flows coupled with political polarisation contributed to the social turmoil that reached local media. Indeed, as Laine (2018) argues, it was not the immigrants as such but the polarisation of reactions to the large-scale arrival of asylum seekers that put European democracies to the test. The ‘deep insecurities triggered by originally unrelated societal changes’ (Laine, 2018, p. 231) all mount into a threatscape that is expressed but not necessarily experienced in everyday life. While Laine calls for a more nuanced understanding of the root causes behind the ‘migrant flows’, we argue it is essential also to deal with the underlying causes for fears and traumas that stem from narrative legacies and learned otherness and how some of these traumas are brought into a place that has learned to live with them.

In contributing to the existing literature on the geopolitics of mobile masses (Choe & Lugosi, 2022; Gillen & Mostafanezhad, 2019; Laine, 2021; Mayer et al., 2021; V. Vainikka & Vainikka, 2018) we argue that tourism researchers and practitioners should be critical when natural force rhetoric is used in media in relation to tourism without local or geopolitical context. We have shown how the discourses on mobile others, absent or present, and comparing them to natural forces and/or viewing them as objects of massification, create geopolitical tensions and affective narratives. We argue that popular geopolitics offers some useful tools how to be sensitive to geopolitics and the bordering effects of geopolitical massification. Further, as tourism remains understudied in relation to media framings of mass tourists and natural force rhetoric, the results are somewhat pioneering as findings and call for more research on how the media produces threatscapes, how it explains local experiences and how mobile groups are bordered and debordered.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research has been supported by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council and Multilayered Borders of Global Security research team (#303527, #303480).

Notes on contributors

Vilhelmiina Vainikka

Vilhelmiina Vainikka is a human geographer who worked at the University of Oulu, Aalborg University and University of Lapland during the research. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University and is interested in masses, relational and topological space, empathy, art-based methods and environmental education.

Joni Tuomas Vainikka

Joni Tuomas Vainikka is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His fields of interest are human geography, identity studies, mobilities and time. His current work, with the Decarbon-Home Strategic Research project, focusses on the spatialities of climate attitudes, socially equitable decarbonisation and geographies of time.

Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola

Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola is Professor of Geography at the University of Oulu. Her fields of interest are political geography and border and migration studies with the specific focus on Europe and Nordic countries. Her recent publications include the anthologies Borderless Worlds for Whom? Ethics, Moralities and Mobilities, Routledge, Border Region Series, 2019 (together with Anssi Paasi, Jarkko Saarinen and Kaj Zimmerbauer) and Borderlands Resilience: Transitions, Adaptation and Resistance at Borders, Routledge, Border Region Series, 2022 (together with Dorte Jagetic Andersen) which contemplates how different groups of people living in border regions cope with and resist current border transitions.

Notes

1 19 August 2015/5–6 September 2015

2 19 August 2015/5–6 September 2015/23 September 2015.

3 Opinion, 2–3 April 2016.

4 Column, Pietilä, 23 September 2015.

5 Opinion, 4 November 2015.

6 Editorial, Kannala, 5–6 September 2015.

7 Editorial, 19 August 2015.

8 Opinion with PS, 24–25 October 2015.

9 28 October 2015.

10 Article, 24 February 2016.

11 Editorial, Kannala, 7–8 November 2015.

12 Editorial, Haapala, 18–19. March 2017.

13 Editorial, Kannala, 1–2 April 2017.

14 Opinion, 27–28, 2016.

15 Interview with a regional leader, 19–20 December 2015.

16 Editorial, Kannala, 16 September 2015.

17 Article, 13–14 May 2017.

18 Interview with a hotel manager, 25 November 2015.

19 Article, 20 July 2017 on Imatra Nights -festival.

20 Article on GoSaimaa tourism marketing, 10–11 July 2017.