The Mediatization and the Politicization of the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe

Mediated politics in/and the “refugee crisis”

Much has been said in 2015–2016 and beyond about the so-called Refugee Crisis—that is, yet another pan-European “crisis” caused by the sudden massive asylum-seeker flow from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. Across Europe and especially in the key EU countries, there have been divergent interpretations of this process. Therein, various mobilizing and politicizing concepts—including humanitarianism, security, diversity, protectionism—were deployed in public discourses to legitimize the ever-new restrictions of migration and asylum policies and diverse expressions of solidarity or lack thereof.

While, in general, we have experienced and witnessed many calls for control and urgency to manage the European borders more tightly—and to illustrate the sheer existence and plausibility of an EU-wide coordinated asylum policy response—there have also been many comments about a presumed regionally specific, including “Eastern” versus “Western” way of dealing with the issue. While central and eastern European countries generally seem to have failed to fulfill their asylum obligations, central, western and northern EU countries did, or at least attempted to, honor their commitments. Nevertheless, there has generally been a huge degree of change in attitudes towards openness and inclusion with, in the majority of cases, increased hostility and at best various reservations towards the incoming asylum seekers (for an extensive outline, see Triandafyllidou's article concluding and summarizing the findings of this Special Issue).

Moreover, diverse interpretations have been put forward as far as this “new odyssey” (Kingsley, 2016) and a genuine human tragedy, indeed unprecedented in the postwar period, is concerned. These interpretations not only pertained to the geopolitical and politico-economic ontology of the so-called Refugee Crisis. They also resulted in discussing income levels, national economies, national commitments to democracy, past individual and collective migration and asylum experiences, current politics, and many other related (and often unrelated) issues that should, at least officially, influence various countries' reactions and their openness toward the incoming migrants and asylum seekers.

At the same time, the continuous exclusionary rhetoric of othering, fuelled by the resurgence of right-wing populist and nationalistic as well as nativist agendas in both Europe and beyond surely contributed to these debates (see, inter alia, Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2017). They all emphasized the ethnonationalist “politics of fear” (Wodak, 2015), especially regarding immigrants and asylum seekers. The former and the latter yet again became an easy target of stigmatizing political and media discourses and practices, which not only contributed to a shift in public moods, imaginaries, or political preferences but often also resulted in outright physical violence toward the incoming “refugees” (see Boukala & Dimitrakopoulou in this Special Issue).

Through the focus on such diversity of patterns of mediatization and politicization of what has overall been dubbed as the Refugee Crisis, this double special issue of the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies aims to address the complexity and the overlapping nature of the processes outlined above. We want to, first and foremost, critically challenge any stereotypical or schematic readings of the recent asylum-seeker and migrant phenomenon and delve into a systematic empirical analysis of how it simultaneously became the focus of media and political agendas. Thereby, we would like to illustrate that the, by now, highly heterogeneous and (too) strongly mediation-dependent European politics created an array of—in most cases negative—interpretations for the Refugee Crisis. These often came about as a token of right-wing populism and outright political opportunism—and indeed very rarely as a case of political responsibility or long-term visions. We also want to highlight that, in each of the analyzed countries, the media-based and mediated political discourses on the Refugee Crisis frequently did not forge any “new” ways of perceiving and interpreting migration and otherness. Instead, these often rested on both national and cross-national recontextualization of historical patterns of talking about “the other” as well as on the national discursive traditions of highly politicized exclusionary thinking.

Discursive shifts, politicization, and mediatization: Interpreting the refugee crisis

Our critical reading of the recent sociopolitical processes and their media-based and political interpretations takes place within several dimensions.

First, we want to challenge the variety of notions and sociopolitical concepts used in recent discourses and among them, very prominently, the discourse of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ itself. The latter, we argue, is strongly ideologically charged and has been developed in media and political discourse mainly to legitimize the alleged urgency, including various “special measures,” that were or were supposed to be taken in recent months and years. Our strong contention is that the concept is both wrong (the recent processes have mainly concerned migrants in general and asylum seekers and not refugees, in particular) and purposefully uses the notion of crisis which, as such, implies larger facets of, in most cases irrevocable, sociopolitical and politico-economic change (see Koselleck, 2006; Krzyżanowski, 2009; Roitman, 2013; Triandafyllidou, Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2009). We also believe that the description of the recent migration flows as “crisis” is both stigmatizing—especially for the migrants themselves—and adding an unnecessarily alarmistic connotation to this discourse. It carries a specifically political function and, as such, it is obviously not arbitrary but intentional and purposeful. In fact, this and other key concepts used most recently are also a case of recontextualization (Bernstein, 1990; Krzyżanowski, 2016; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010) of earlier (negativized) descriptions of large-scale developments related to immigration and asylum seeking (e.g., in the context of wars such as in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s; see Matouschek, Wodak, & Januschek, 1995; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Wodak, 2013a, 2013b; Wodak & Van Dijk, 2000).

Our aim is, however, to look much deeper than just into words, notions, or concepts (or merely into political and media representations of the recent occurrences). Indeed, we recognize that the discourses on the Refugee Crisis are part of, on the one hand, changing/shifting hegemonic political agendas and related discourses and, on the other, a token of negative implications of the wider and indeed preexisting processes of simultaneous politicization and mediatization of immigration (e.g., Baker et al., 2008; Messer et al., 2012; Reisigl & Wodak, 2000; Wodak & Forchtner, 2014).

Our theorization of discursive dynamics departs from the notion of discursive change (Fairclough, 1992), indeed is one of the foundational concepts in critical-analytical approaches that link contributions in our Special Issue. We treat discursive change as a certain macro-level concept—that is, one that denotes global or transnational, macro-level dynamic framing of discourse characteristic for specific periods of time. We see discursive change as, however, necessarily operationalized at the mezzo- or micro-level by the concept of discursive shifts (Krzyżanowski, 2013a, this Special Issue)—that is, a set of local, micro-level appropriations of discursive changes. Those appropriations are actor-specific responses to social, political, and economic macro-level transformations. Discursive shifts are, importantly, nonsimultaneous, contextual, and field dependent. For example, as we show, in response to—but also as a token of accommodation of—discursive changes such as the ongoing securitization of sociopolitical realities, political radicalization, or the solidification of the neoliberal framing of public spheres, a significant shift to new types of discourses on immigration took place, drawing on traditional and new forms of discriminatory rhetoric or outright racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia (see Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009; Yuval-Davis, 2011).

In many cases—often fuelled by the rise of political radicalism and ethno-nationalist mobilization—that shift has resulted in a move toward Islamophobia as one of the key patterns of xeno-racist discursive scapegoating and othering (Krzyżanowski, 2013b; Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009). The latter has often entailed all-embracing discrimination against Muslims (Bennett, ter Wal, Lipiński, Fabiszak, & Krzyżanowski, 2013) and the development of a new framing of the majority of issues related to multiculturalism from the point of view of apparent interreligious and thereby intercultural conflicts (Bauböck & Tripkovic, 2017; Wodak, 2017).

As the ensuing contributions to our double Special Issue highlight, the advantage of analyzing the dynamics of discourses around the Refugee Crisis resides in the ability to thereby capture the long-term diachronic changes and shifts of public, especially political and media, discourses. Moreover, we are able to observe a variety of context-dependent shifts (of smaller/larger scale), as part of wider political dynamics and policies on immigration in contemporary Europe, and their simultaneous or subsequent mediatization.

Indeed, our view on discursive dynamics is deployed here in the course of the critical and in-depth exploration of the mutual interdependence of processes of politicization, on the one hand, and mediatization, on the other. Whereas the two notions have been widely debated in either social/political or media/communication theory, there have been few studies so far that would relate them to each other, especially in the sense of ideological dimensions of politicization as well as top-down strategic dimensions of mediatization (see also Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, & Wodak, 2013).

In general terms, politicization serves as a description of the process of making “all questions political questions, all issues political issues, all values political values and all decisions political decisions” (Hartwell, 1979, p. 14). As such, politicization denotes the growing power of the state and thereby of the political actors who, in the process of competing for power over the state system, tend to politicize matters and issues that are of public-wide concern. While widely criticized by, in particular, proponents of liberalism and neoliberalism, politicization could, however, be well seen as having some positive aspects. For example, it denotes the fact that many issues that would otherwise be deemed “private” or “unimportant” may actually enter the public domain and become part of ongoing political debates. Historically, we know that the politicization of some matters (e.g., those related to civil, women's, LGBT, ethnic, religious, or minority rights) has been vital in empowering various social groups and has become instrumental in increasing public visibility of their claims in the eyes of political actors and the wider public.

However, as especially discourses and politics on immigration in Europe and beyond have shown, politicization has two vital and indeed very negative consequences. First, it creates an imbalance of power by shifting its majority to the political realm. Thereby, politicization “takes the manifest from of increasing the power of the state, of increasing political power as against all other forms of power in society, of increasing the power of politicians and the bureaucrats as against the power of individuals, private institutions, and voluntary associations” (Hartwell, 1979, p. 15). This implies the weakening of individual agency in social reality and makes both individuals and groups strongly reliant on political action (which, however, in fact proves increasingly more and more inefficient). Or “for the individual, this has meant increasing political dependence and awareness, along with increasing political ineffectiveness and frustration” (Hartwell, 1979, p. 15).

The second and perhaps the even more negative aspect of politicization is the fact that it contributes to the far-reaching ideologization of public debates as various issues that are politicized must effectively also be articulated in line with ideologies that dominate the political realm. In this vein, Ellul (1967/1979, p. 211) famously argued that politicization results in an increased volume of “ideological debate, doctrinal conflict, systematic argumentation along certain lines” (Ellul 1967/1979, p. 211) and that the task of a critical exploration of politicization is to “ask why these ideological debates have increased and what attitude people assume” (Ellul 1967/1979, p. 211–212). Transcending Benda's (1969) famous argumentation on the dogmatization of public debates and the logic of political passions, Hartwell (1979, p. 16) also claimed that politicized ideologization of debates may very easily be seen as source of social conflict and one of the “effective ingredients of violence, a specific endemic disease of all modern societies.”

Both of the highlighted negative aspects of politicization—and especially the issues of power imbalance and of ideologization—create an open space for hegemonic narratives that dominate contemporary public discourse. Thereby, the main problem is not whether/if certain issues are politicized (as most are anyway) but indeed how and when and if they are, for example, scandalized or not, become viral in the social media and their echo-chambers (Allern & Pollack, 2012; Brodnig, 2016; Entman, 2012). Hence, once politicized, various socially relevant topics become widely constructed along political visions and ideological imaginaries. Therefore, the important aspect of analyzing politicization —especially in the context of topics such as immigration—is hence to remain critical of their political framings and mindful of the fact that what they really represent are the interests of the political elites.

Immigration has indeed become a highly politicized topic in recent years, especially in terms of the ideologization of related debates but also of making politics the key locus to effectively dictate the public views on immigration. While some decades ago immigration was certainly much less debated in politics and wider public spheres (see Wodak & Pelinka, 2002), nowadays the topic has indeed become one of the most frequently debated and the most strongly politicized. This happened due to the continuous merging of the—sometimes distinct, sometimes blurred—categories of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in their representation in the media (see above). At this point, we agree with Buonfino (2004), who spoke about politicization of immigration as a process of competition between its various political framings that are, in the end-effect, almost always either economic or security related in nature (see Bourbeau, 2013; Krzyżyanowski & Ledin, 2017; Watson, 2009; Wodak & Van Dijk, 2000). It has thereby been argued that by politicizing and politically highlighting immigration, governments and other political actors would want to present themselves as “in control” of immigration, which they would ideologically view as a certain “problem” (van Dijk, 1998). As a result, however, that strongly negative framing of immigration would prevail within the political sphere under the overall heading that immigration must be “tackled” (e.g., Martin-Rojo & Van Dijk, 1997; van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999). This would eventually have a very significant spillover effect onto other areas of the public sphere with, in particular, the media discourses often following political agendas' patterns of negative politicization.

The final concept that is crucial for the contributions across our Special Issue is that of mediatization of politics which, as is argued here, is one of the main carriers of contemporary immigration discourses and of their long-term politicization.

As such, the concept of mediatization in the political context describes the processes whereby politics becomes increasingly dependent on both mass media and other facets of mediated practices (most recently via social/online media). These, it has been argued, profoundly change how politics works: They alter political practices into a process of mediated attention-seeking rather than of political representation and policy making.

Both the classic (Bennett & Entman, 1999; Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999; Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999) and the more recent work on the mediatization of politics (Esser & Strömbäck, 2014; Hjarvard, 2008; Preston, 2008; Strömbäck, 2008) have rightly argued that mediatization is a gradual process. It not only entails the move from (relatively neutral and information-like) mediation to the (far reaching) mediatization of politics but also consists of distinct phases. These not only imply the gradual encroachment of media into politics but also more power of the media on the wider society, which, paradoxically, thus becomes increasingly dependent on mediated hegemonic political control. As a result, it has been contended that in contemporary political communication “mediated reality matters more than any kind of actual or objective reality” (Strömbäck, 2008, p. 239).

Using mediatization as one of the key concepts in contributions to our Special Issue allows us to systematically look at how online and social media are used nowadays by political leaders and party headquarters as the main channel of political communication. This channel is highly cost-efficient by reaching out to millions of users and being instantly reproduced without any production/transmission costs. It also appears to be “neutral” and as if developing “spontaneously” from the ground up, or giving voice to the people. But in reality it involves some very specific top-down communication strategies on the part of parties and party leaders.

This is particularly interesting for the ever-more successful radical right and right-wing populist parties and platforms across Europe. The former and the latter have, namely, been able to spread their exclusionary anti-immigration messages by providing simplistic explanations to complex socioeconomic and political phenomena, indeed, particularly via online and social media (for a recent comprehensive account see Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2017). As has been extensively shown, radical-right parties strongly gain political capital via online communication of anti-immigration rhetoric despite often being excluded from traditional media or even being denied space in public broadcasting. In a similar vein, the rise of the “uncivil society” (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017; Ruzza, 2009) that is often affiliated to the radical right and its outright racist or generally discriminatory views has also been based strongly on the online communication.

Yet as all of these examples certainly emphasize, the arrival of online “mediation opportunity structures” (Cammaerts 2012) has very significantly altered the logic of constructing political messages on immigration. The latter, as will be shown in the contributions to our Special Issue, display some profound change to the way political discourses are nowadays structured, in most cases not as single/unitary voices but as purposefully polyphonic narratives. Hence, as highlighted by these contributions, mediatization allows capturing the process whereby not only the radical-right parties but also mainstream politics resorts to simplistic explanations about international migration and asylum seeking. They do so while using social and online media and in order to build and diffuse their discourse, eventually presenting specific policy choices as “unavoidable” solutions and, thereby, while normalizing radical- and extreme-right attitudes and opinions (see Wodak 2015, 2018; article by Rheindorf & Wodak in this Special Issue). Indeed, one of the main discursive shifts that occurred in Europe during the Refugee Crisis is many countries' mainstream political movements and parties (including governments') ever-more obvious endorsement of anti-immigration rhetoric and/or of a harshened stance on openness toward refugees. Such shifts have been skillfully mediated and legitimized via online messages to legitimize or very often prelegitimize (Krzyżanowski, 2014) ensuing change in politics and policies of immigration and asylum, allegedly under the pressure of the Refugee Crisis. This, to be sure, has helped mainstream politics to gain legitimacy for its changing policies while at the same time still keeping its moderate image (Wodak, 2017b). It hence showed how the mediation-driven “digital politics” (Vaccari, 2013) has become the main carrier of the spillover of exclusionary views across public spheres and political spectra. By the same token, it has also become the gateway for the further spread of “anxious politics” (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015) which, building mainly (if not solely) on the fears, imaginaries, and anxieties, now not only mobilizes the radical right but also stretches through the entire continuum of both left- and right-wing European politics.

Outline of special issue and contributions

Our Special Issue bring together leading scholars working on migration-related discourses and practices in European politics and the media. Their aim is to critically analyze how the recent refugee “crisis” has been interpreted in media and political discourse with a view of guiding social and, in particular, political action.

Contributions to our Special Issue have not been designed in a strictly comparative way. They rather focus on periods of particular significance and urgency within selected regions (especially in south versus north versus east/central versus west Europe). We also look at countries along and outside of the key “routes” taken by migrants in the recent “crisis” and recognize that, while in some countries many discourses and interpretations stem from the actual experience of receiving the arriving migrants, in many countries, however, the discourse remains largely imaginary and boils down to politicized and mediatized visions, and, mainly imaginary scenarios of migrants as a danger and threat.

Analyzing discursive practices in first arrival countries such as Greece, countries further along the so-called “Balkan route” (Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia), further into central and eastern Europe (Austria, Germany, Poland), and in final destinations such as Sweden and the UK, we aim at highlighting the discursive patterns of representing, interpreting, and instrumentalizing the Refugee Crisis as a recent phenomenon in the European public sphere. We are also considering how these discursive practices are intertwined with past discourses on migration, asylum, nation, and alterity—thus, connecting this current “crisis” and related public and political discourse dynamics with previous ones, often on the background of asylum panics in Europe. However, by the same token, we also look at countries such as Poland which, despite rejecting any refugee arrivals, have seen a development of virulent anti-immigration and anti-refugee discourses developed in most cases to legitimize its own negative political response.

While tackling the discursive politics/media interface in an in-depth, empirical, and systematic way, the articles in this Special Issue target the specific context-dependent interplay between mediated political and mass media discourses. They explore how and if former east versus west or south versus north divisions in Europe are resurfacing and how such discourses reflect national traditions (of national self-conceptions and conceptions of the “other”) or a common European discourse on solidarity or, indeed, on migration/asylum control.

Opening the double Special Issue, Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak consider interpretations of the Refugee Crisis in Austria. They claim that Austrian politics has long been characterized by a variety of discursive struggles whereby various meanings of salient concepts, such as “border” or “maximum-limit” have been proposed across the political spectrum. They eventually became hegemonic in both politics, media, and in the wider Austrian public sphere. As the authors show, the phase at the peak of the Refugee Crisis in late 2015 and 2016 was outright dominated by such metadiscursive negotiation of terminology related to building a border fence and setting a maximum limit on refugees. Both issues raised serious ideological and legal concerns and were thus largely euphemized, as responses to ever-increasing pressure from the political right but also as politically-opportunistic messages sent out to the public as potential voters. This, as the authors argue in much detail, eventually allowed for the normalization of restrictive policies in the theoretical framework of border and body politics, otherness, and, indeed, mediatization.

While retaining the focus on central Europe, Andreja Vezovnik looks next at the process of securitization of immigration in Slovenia as one of the key countries along the so-called Balkan route. Vezovnik focuses on the securitization discourse that emerged in Slovenian TV news during the 2015 stage of the Refugee Crisis. The author first explores how the said discourse evolved in the context of the migrant situation in Slovenia and under the country's legal and policy frame. This is followed by an analysis of Slovenian TV news, which illustrates how the rhetorics of exceptionality, criminalization, security, and militarization all eventually became constituents for what the article defines as the wider securitization of discourse. The author eventually concludes with a reflection on securitization and governmentality and argues that the former is an act of legitimizing the latter.

In the following article, Federico Giulio Sicurella looks at the language of walls along the “Balkan route.” He maintains that, as the Refugee Crisis unfolded, physical rather than just symbolic border walls and fences became an increasingly accepted and legitimate way of coping with the challenges of immigration. The article eventually examines the intellectual response toward such fence-building logic and analyzes how Serbian and Croatian public intellectuals reacted to the dramatic impact of Hungary's decision to fortify its southern border in September 2015. The analysis of salient argumentative strategies reveals how the intellectual criticism of wall building was embedded in specific discourses of values, in historical narratives, and in the topos of “Fortress Europe,” long-standing in European politics and political imaginaries.

Moving the focus on to the northern part of central and eastern Europe, Michał Krzyżanowski explores politicization and mediatization of the Refugee Crisis in Poland. The author shows that, although largely absent from Polish political discourse after 1989, anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric has recently become extremely politically potent in Poland. The analysis illustrates that an array of new anti-immigration discourses has been enacted in Poland's public sphere by the right-wing populist party PiS (Law & Justice) who used the recent Refugee Crisis to spread its discriminatory views and ideologies as part of political campaigning. As the article shows, PiS's largely imaginary discourse spread in political genres and via offline and online media. It has drawn on the orchestrated and strategic dissemination of discursive patterns combining, inter alia, Islamophobia, Euroskepticism or anti-internationalism as well as of historical patterns and templates of discrimination such as traditional Polish anti-Semitism.

The second part of our double Special Issue focuses on the arrival/destination rather than on the refugee transit countries. It opens up with an article on Sweden by Michał Krzyżanowski, which argues that despite its traditional openness and pro-immigration stance, Sweden has recently witnessed a gradual change into discourses aiming to legitimize the curtailing of immigrant intake as well as limiting the immigrant rights. The article argues that different patterns of politicization of immigration have traditionally dominated in Sweden and focuses on Swedish mainstream politics wherein some explicit focus on politicization via (past and current) immigration-related policies persists. However, as the analysis of the governing Swedish Social Democratic Party's Twitter discourse shows, a hybrid new discourse of politicization is now emerging and has been used widely in the context of the Refugee Crisis. It has allowed mainstream and other Swedish political actors to legitimize restrictive immigration policy by way of often populist-like politicization patterns and using new modes of online political communication.

Germany, the third of the key European destination countries in the course of the Refugee Crisis, is the focus of an article by Bastian Vollmer and Serhat Karakayali. The authors argue that the anti-immigration continuum of public attitude–media politics has undergone significant change in the course of the Refugee Crisis in Germany. By examining migrant representations and discursive events taking place in 2015 and early 2016, the authors point to the volatility of the recent discourse on refugees. A historical/critical discourse analysis highlights how new topoi arose and “old” topoi—especially stemming from the security/power paradigm—have reconquered the German public discourse. Using newspaper coverage, Vollmer and Karakayali discuss discursive events in three main sections: borders, arrival, and presence. They show discursive shifts that have taken place and how they have had an impact on the re-configuration of categories such as, in particular, migrants or refugees

The following article by Samuel Bennett looks at the UK as yet another destination country, which, however, unlike openness-driven Germany or Sweden, introduced strict limitations on the migrant and asylum-seeker influx right from the outset of the current crisis. Bennett's contribution analyzes Twitter accounts of key UK political actors to show that their topoi and legitimation strategies changed over time. He argues that this discursive shift takes place largely in reaction to specific (mediatized) events throughout 2015. Bennett also claims that such discourses can be seen as recontextualization of existing discourses that have been present in the UK public sphere for a number of years.

Returning to the first-arrival countries, Monica Colombo explores representations of the Refugee Crisis in Italy. She specifically analyzes the process whereby securitarian and other discourses were intertwined as part of political strategy. The author first offers an overview of how the Refugee Crisis has been represented by the Italian press and looks at the various combinations of discourses that dominated media reports. Then, as a token of political discourse, she examines in much detail, inter alia, the speech that the then Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, posted on his Facebook page and delivered at the Italian Parliament. Colombo shows that, delivered the day before the special summit of the European Council called in the aftermath of the Mediterranean Sea tragedy of April 18, 2015, the speech opened several avenues for the interpretation of the Refugee Crisis and emphasized security-oriented dimensions often legitimized by compassion and humanitarianism.

Staying within the southern European focus, Salomi Boukala and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou explore in depth the Greek social media discourses on the Refugee Crisis. Drawing on the European threats regarding Greece's expulsion from the Schengen zone, the authors explore whether and how the Greek traditional and social media were deployed in the course of the Refugee Crisis and how their discourse underwent various shifts while drawing on a variety of resources including ideologies of a homogenous Greek nation-state and its imaginaries. The authors assume that the Refugee Crisis led to a polarized climate that eventually also dominated the Greek and European political scene and posed challenges to European solidarity. Boukala and Dimitrakopoulou first explore the social media discourses of the Greek prime minister and the president of the main opposition party regarding the European debate on the Schengen agreement's suspension. They then juxtapose this analysis with the examination of Greek media coverage of both the Schengen debate and the Refugee Crisis.

Finally, closing our double Special Issue publication, Anna Triandafyllidou provides an extensive comparative article exploring and highlighting key tendencies in the analyses provided throughout all contributions. She does so with the emphasis on patterns of both mediatization and politicization of the Refugee Crisis in Europe. Triandafyllidou points to a wide range of discursive tendencies and shifts and pulls the different threads together with the aim of providing a narrative of how the crisis has unfolded and how the discursive dynamics were aligned with the actual developments. By following such “real-world” events contributing to the Refugee Crisis as they happened, Triandafyllidou is able to identify which events were taken up (and how) in the different national political contexts and media landscapes as highly relevant. By doing so, Triandafyllidou provides a meta-analysis of the findings of our double Special Issue as well as highlights the main interpretative frames used to make sense of the refugee emergency and its pan-European representations and interpretations.