Introduction
This article presents a critical account of the moments when the refugee is stripped of her exceptional and subordinate position and comes closer to becoming the subject of her own story. It also aims to analyze the implications of these specific representations for constructing Turkishness and critically address the limitations and paradoxes of these moments of subjectification and humanization, which can be considered the exception to the exception. To make sense of why such moments appear as rare and conditional, the article first situates them against theoretical accounts that explain how refugees are structurally positioned at the threshold of rights, belonging, and recognizability.
In his “post-modern political classic” (Ojakangas Reference Ojakangas2005, 5), Agamben argues that the camp cannot be viewed merely as a historical phenomenon or an anomaly of the past but rather as the hidden matrix or nomos of the political space in which we live (Agamben Reference Agamben1998, 166). Diken and Laustsen (Reference Diken and Laustsen2005, 17) have argued that a decisive amount of social practices and urban structures today is organized according to the logic of the camp. At the heart of the debate over the camp are the processes and mechanisms of political inclusion and exclusion. Who is or is not human? Who is more human than others, or who has or does not have the right to live? (Özmakas Reference Özmakas2018, 187).
The refugee is “socially a zombie” (Diken and Laustsen Reference Diken and Laustsen2005, 84), a scandal for philosophy and politics since she “recalls the radical instability of meaning and the calculability of the human” and challenges the political formation of the political order itself through raising an urgent and complex question regarding what it is to be human (Dillon Reference Dillon1998, 30). It pertains to the nature of being human in a state of in-betweenness, devoid of a secure identity or dwelling place – a question that is inevitable, irresolvable, yet pressing and widespread today.
Most studies on how refugees are framed in the media focus on negative representations. Less attention has been paid to analyzing moments of humanization and individualization. In this study, I focus on specific narratives that express the attributes of a “good” or “acceptable” refugee, those qualities deemed necessary to “deserve” protection and to be treated as a human being. Across the Turkish press, refugees approach recognizability as fully human only through three recurring “good refugee” figures: the vulnerable woman/child; the heroic young man; and the exceptional achiever (athlete, artist, scientist, entrepreneur). The first figure is explicitly gendered and infantilized: women and children become “acceptable” because they are constructed as weak, dependent, and – crucially – non-threatening. By contrast, refugee men are more often represented through a double bind as both potential threats and moral failures (e.g. cowards), and they can be recoded as “good” only when they perform masculinity through extraordinary, often self-sacrificial, acts, typically in the service of Turkish citizens or residents. Taken together, these conditional forms of humanization do not simply individualize refugees; they also help stage Turkishness as benevolent, protective, and brave, while leaving “ordinary” refugees outside the horizon of unconditional rights.
The study will focus on the relationship between the universal human condition and refugees, first by critically examining Agamben’s concept of “naked life.” This section will also problematize the distinction between “bad” and “good” refugees within the framework of “humanitarian reason.” The following section will tackle framing theory and research. The study’s methodology will be presented in detail in the subsequent part. The final section will focus on the dominant discursive patterns of positive framing of refugees in the Turkish press.
From homo sacer to the “humanitarian reason”: the bad, the good, and the pitiful refugee
Agamben (Reference Agamben2008, 92) identifies the exclusion of refugees from the scope of human rights as the most fundamental paradox and crisis of our time. Being “something less than human” (Nyers Reference Nyers2006), the status of the refugee has been considered as “a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation” (Agamben Reference Agamben2008, 92). Accordingly, the key to understanding modern politics lies in its biopolitical character (Schuilenburg Reference Schuilenburg2008, 87). When agency, distinction, and individuality are removed from a human being, they are left with the “bare life,” or zoe in Agamben’s terms (Agamben 1998; 2005; Reference Agamben2008). Homo sacer “is the bare or depoliticized life that is distinguished from politicized forms of life, most clearly manifest in the citizen” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr Reference Rajaram and Grundy-Warr2004, 34). Agamben focuses on the detritus, or the waste (Schütz Reference Schütz2000, 121) of the system, and “it is through this detritus, paradoxically included by the very act of differentiation and exclusion, that the system maintains itself” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr Reference Rajaram and Grundy-Warr2004, 41). The simultaneous exclusion of human beings deprived of full legal status is a condition for inclusion in political society (Lemke Reference Lemke2011, 54).
In Turkey, Agambenian perspectives have been mobilized across work on minorities and forced migration (Civelek 2017; Reference Civelek2023; Çetin Reference Çetin2023; Sert and Yıldız Reference Sert and Yıldız2011; Tansuğ Reference Tansuğ2021; Yalçınkaya Reference Yalçınkaya2005), but their direct transfer has also been questioned (Ongur and Zengin Reference Ongur and Zengin2019). I prefer to approach homo sacer as a heuristic tool, attentive to critiques of conceptual rigidity (Patton Reference Patton, Calarco and DeCaroli2007, 218) and to Lemke’s and Ojakangas’s warnings about a reductionist conflation of sovereign and biopolitical power that neglects biopolitics as a political economy of life (Lemke Reference Lemke2011, 60; Ojakangas Reference Ojakangas2005, 14). Accordingly, rather than treating refugees as bare life everywhere, I propose problematizing how Turkish news discourse constructs conditional recognizability and deservingness, setting the stage for a shift to humanitarian reason and the “good refugee” figures.
Who is the “good refugee” and can she succeed in transcending the limits of the homo sacer, or the “abject status of speechlessness” through the acquisition of an individual voice and agency? (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr Reference Rajaram and Grundy-Warr2004, 37), Referring to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Finkielkraut (Reference Finkielkraut2001, 5) noted that the idea of all-inclusive humanity – one that makes no distinctions between races or cultures – is a recent invention. He also added that a man needed to fulfill “a set of Draconian conditions” to be accepted as a member of human society. What was new was not only the very definition of “humanity” itself; equally historical and variable were the forms of social imaginary and moral sentiments mobilized to address the problems and tragedies confronting humankind. Fassin (Reference Fassin2012, 247) named this powerful social imaginary “humanitarian reason.” “A morally complicated creature, a flawed hero defined by the passions, politics, and power of its times,” (Barnett Reference Barnett2011, 7) humanitarianism is circumstantial, contextual, and situational; ethical practices are limited by culture and choice (Barnett Reference Barnett2011, 9). Fassin (Reference Fassin2012, 136) points out how, in only a decade, refugee politics have evolved from a logic of differentiation – based on separating the legals from illegals – to one of legitimate discrimination – based on separating the desirables from the undesirables. In and through this process, “political asylum became subsidiary to humanitarian reason … [and] the logic of compassion now prevailed over the right to protection” (Fassin Reference Fassin2012, 145).
Fassin (Reference Fassin2012) and Barnett (Reference Barnett2011) warn us that humanitarian reason can include both emancipation and domination. The politics of compassion encompasses equality and solidarity, as well as paternalistic control over those in need of aid and protection. The asymmetry is political, as compassion is directed from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker, the more fragile, and the more vulnerable (Fassin Reference Fassin2012, 4). By Barnett’s (Reference Barnett2011, 11) words, “any act of intervention, no matter how well intended, is also an act of control.” The reification of humanitarian assistance might be one of the outcomes of humanitarian reason.
Though the definitions of “good” and “bad” vary, discursive patterns are recognizable through different texts and contexts. Clark et al. (Reference Clark, Haw and Mackenzie2024, 150) note that the “good refugee” archetype is based on an assemblage of characteristics that denote passivity, vulnerability, gratitude, compliance, and productivity. In Hetz’s (Reference Hetz2022, 882) analysis of refugees’ discourses regarding their deservingness, the key traits of the “good refugee” are identified as political moderation and passivity, which limit opportunities for agency and political voice.
Wernesjö’s (Reference Wernesjö2020) account, based on narratives of unaccompanied young refugees in Sweden, emphasizes the importance of diligence, gratitude, responsibility, and educational orientation in constructing and negotiating deservingness. According to the author, these narratives are manifestations of a conditional belonging in the Swedish welfare state. Rud’s (Reference Rud2018) discursive analysis of the Refugee Council of Australia’s publication highlights work, employment, and careers as prominent themes. Rud (Reference Rud2018) suggests that achieving an education and attending university often represent important goals for these individuals. The success stories portray refugees as sources of unrealized potential and success, capable of making positive contributions to the host community. Economic contribution plays a pivotal role in both discourses of deservingness and public perceptions of refugees. Drawing on Eurobarometer 66.3 data from twenty-five European countries, Careja and Andreß (Reference Careja and Andreß2013, 403) argue that labor-market policies for immigrants influence natives’ opinions. Careja and Andreß (Reference Careja and Andreß2013, 405) concluded that “new labor immigration policies are supported with arguments that emphasize the potential economic usefulness of immigrants and their complementarity to the national workforce,” thus positively shaping the public sentiment toward refugees. However, this point highlights the strong neoliberal element of the good refugee archetype: “that aid is extended to refugees as a service offered to consumers, rather than as a care-based ethic premised on a shared humanity” (Clark et al. Reference Clark, Haw and Mackenzie2024, 152). Likewise, in analyzing constructions of Australia’s refugee ideal, Haw (Reference Haw2021, 3167) states that the “good refugees” and “good citizens” are defined by their successful contributions to the host nation’s labor force and their ability to support their families without relying on welfare resources. This framework is grounded in a neoliberal understanding of individual responsibility, which holds individuals accountable for their own support.
Szczepanik (Reference Szczepanik2016) discusses how refugees are categorized as “good” and “bad” based on the “imagined refugeehoods” constructed through media narratives. In certain media narratives, “individuals who do not possess the attributes of a ‘good’ or ‘genuine’ refugee are not only seen as undeserving [of] protection but oftentimes it is also implied that they intend to abuse the system of social welfare” (Szczepanik Reference Szczepanik2016, 26).
The “good refugee” archetype also evokes its constitutive outsider, the “bad refugee archetype” (Clark et al. Reference Clark, Haw and Mackenzie2024, 149). Cousens (Reference Cousens2015) argues that the priority and sensitivity given to women and child refugees in media discourse are often at the expense of male refugees, implying that the lives of male refugees are less valuable. Likewise, Judge (Reference Judge2010, 5) states that in the United Kingdom, although the majority of asylum seekers are young males, they are invisible or problematically visible in media narratives. Reserving compassion for women and children may lead to “symbolic (and often unconscious) dehumanization” of the males by stripping away their individuality and agency (Szczepanik Reference Szczepanik2016, 25).
Freedman (Reference Freedman2015, 22) criticizes the amalgamation of “women and children” into one category of “vulnerable refugees,” for failing to appreciate “the evolving nature of gendered relations and of women’s part in reinforcing or in challenging these relations.” Moreover, these representations essentialize gender differences and inequalities and further reinforce gendered constructions of women’s powerlessness and lack of agency.
Pupavac (Reference Pupavac2008, 272) asserts that sympathetic representations typically oscillate between portraying refugees as gifted or traumatized. The first position rests on an exclusionary division between culturally deserving exceptions and ordinary refugees “warts and all” (Pupavac Reference Pupavac2008, 284). The hyphenated refugee, preferably a woman, deserves protection and acceptance: “the refugee doctor, refugee artist, refugee academic and so on” (Pupavac Reference Pupavac2008, 287). The second position situates refugees at the center of webs of power, whose borders are drawn by the discourse of health, and views the refugee as a subject who is talked about, who cannot speak for herself, who is dependent, and whose reason is impaired.
Malkki (Reference Malkki1996, 378) focuses on how humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees by depoliticizing the refugee category and constructing an ahistorical, universal, humanitarian subject in that depoliticized space. The “real refugee” of the humanitarian discourse imagines the refugee as “a victim whose judgment and reason had been compromised by his or her experiences” (Malkki Reference Malkki1996, 384). The most important consequence of such representations is “the systematic, even if unintended, silencing of persons who find themselves in the classificatory space of ‘refugee’” (Malkki Reference Malkki1996, 386). The vision of helplessness is linked to the constitution of speechlessness among refugees who need “protection” or “someone to speak for them.” These representations are further reinforced by visual materials that depict refugees as anonymous masses, bodies without names, faces, distinguishing marks, or personal style.
The term “refugee” has been loaded with certain norms and characteristics that could be related to poverty, victimhood, age, gender, and success. The more these categories are associated with vulnerability, sympathy, pity, and victimhood, the more a refugee will be categorized as “good.” However, there is also a certain nuance that should not go unnoticed. The image of “good” and “welcomed” refugees may also be differentiated. For example, even if a refugee is considered a “good,” she might still not be welcomed and seen as a burden. This approach will evoke negative feelings and hostility towards refugees, even though they meet all the “criteria.” This is especially evident in the dynamics between refugees and host communities (Clark et al. Reference Clark, Haw and Mackenzie2024, 152).
Framing the refugee subject
Frames are “conceptual tools media and individuals rely on to convey, interpret and evaluate information” (Neuman et al. Reference Neuman, Just and Crigler1992, 60). News frames do not simply reflect social phenomena; they perpetually define and redefine them (Tuchman Reference Tuchman1978, 278). In this sense, frames invite audiences to think about issues in particular ways by activating patterned associations between concepts (Tewksbury and Scheufele Reference Tewksbury, Scheufele, Bryant and Oliver2008, 19). As Pan and Kosicki (Reference Pan and Kosicki1993, 57) emphasize, framing can be analyzed both as a strategy of constructing and processing news discourse and as a property of the discourse itself.
Across contexts, scholarship identifies recurring clusters in refugee portrayals. Bozdağ and Smets (Reference Bozdağ and Smets2017), for example, summarize common frames under danger/securitization/control, economy/social costs, culture/integration, and humanitarianism. A shared feature across these clusters is “massification,” through which refugees appear as homogeneous aggregates with assumedly uniform characteristics. Khosravinik (Reference Khosravinik2010, 13) similarly notes the systematic treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as a single undifferentiated group in British newspapers. Where refugees are individualized, they are often positioned as helpless victims in need of protection (d’Haenens and de Lange Reference d’Haenens and de Lange2001; Gale Reference Gale2004), and this objectification can be intensified through personalized, dramatized, and emotionalized storytelling (Valkenburg et al. Reference Valkenburg, Semetko and de Vreese1999).
Research on Turkey largely maps onto these broader patterns, but with context-specific emphases. Studying eight Turkish print outlets, Efe (Reference Efe2015) groups news about Syrian asylum seekers into problems faced by asylum seekers, local issues, political news, and border security, concluding that even “humanistic” portrayals tend to depict asylum seekers as sufferers/victims. Subsequent studies similarly show the dominance of victimization (e.g. refugee children as “victims” and “sufferers”) (Gök and Çifci Reference Gök and Çifci2017), alongside problematizing frames that cast refugees as burdens or threats (Göker and Keskin Reference Göker and Keskin2015; Kalaman et al. Reference Kalaman, Demir and Bolat2019). Work that explicitly considers “positive” portrayals also notes their reliance on stereotyping and overgeneralization (Bilge Reference Bilge2019), while more sympathetic coverage still rarely amplifies refugees’ own voices and demands (Kavaklı Reference Kavaklı2017).
Taken together, this literature shows that refugees in the Turkish press are most frequently framed either as a victim/sufferer or as a scapegoat/problem. While much scholarship on refugees’ media representations focuses on negative portrayals, this article critically examines what might appear as “positive” representations – and asks how humanitarian and individualized narratives nonetheless produce conditional recognition and deservingness, a concern that directly informs the analysis of the “good refugee” figures developed in the sections that follow.
Methodology
With the assistance of a private media-monitoring agency, the full universe of news coverage on international migration, migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees published in eight selected national newspapers between 2011 and December 2020 was compiled. Using keyword searches (e.g. “migration,” “immigrant,” “asylum seeker,” “refugee,” “guest,” “refugee camp,” “Syrian,” “Afghan,” “Iraqi,” etc.), a total of 120,000 news items, which were catalogued in an Excel database was retrieved. From this population, a simple random sample of 2,285 items was drawn, achieving a 95 percent confidence level with a 2 percent margin of error. After removing irrelevant items, the remaining sample was subjected to qualitative content analysis, with coding conducted across twenty-seven thematic categories.Footnote 1 The final dataset of 2,285 news items was distributed across the eight outlets as follows: socialist left (anti-government) BirGün (239 items; 10.46 percent); secular center-left (anti-government) Cumhuriyet (317; 13.87 percent); secular–nationalist (pro-government) Hürriyet (305; 13.35 percent); popular tabloid (pro-government) Posta (246; 10.77 percent); conservative partisan (pro-government) Sabah (310; 13.57 percent); secular nationalist (anti-government) Sözcü (216; 9.45 percent); conservative partisan (pro-government) Türkiye (293; 12.82 percent); and ultra-nationalist right (anti-government) Yeniçağ (359; 15.71 percent).
The interface provided by the agency helped the printed versions of newspaper news (as image files), news texts (text and Word files), and detailed imprint information about the news (Excel file) to be reached. The selection of newspapers was based on four criteria: only national newspapers were included, thematic publications such as sports and financial papers were excluded, those with the highest circulation were chosen, and low-circulation newspapers representing diverse political positions in Turkey, such as Sözcü and BirGün, were also considered.
Following content analysis, specific news articles were subjected to discourse analysis. The news articles that were subjected to discourse analysis were selected from among those (n = 60) that presented refugees positively, were located within the humanitarian frame, and focused on success stories, achievements, or personal life stories. With a few exceptions, the news reports are unique stories that do not appear in more than one newspaper. The reports are distributed across the newspapers in approximately equal numbers.
Discourse analysis centers on understanding how power relations in society are interpreted by examining the hierarchical structure of the semiotic domain. Through a constant and dynamic struggle, meanings are continually created, negotiated, fixed, and renegotiated. A discourse is defined as “a system of statements that constructs an object” (Parker Reference Parker1992, 3). This analysis examines how discourses shape political and ideological outcomes by investigating whether certain identities and activities are emphasized or marginalized (Machin Reference Machin2013, 352). It focuses on discursive events, including written and spoken language, and explores how social and cultural institutions are formed and ideologically shaped due to power dynamics (Fairclough Reference Fairclough2010, 93).
The “good refugee” in the news discourse
In this section, I will revisit the central question posed in the article’s title: when does a refugee become fully recognized as a human being? More specifically, I will examine the conditions under which refugees are portrayed as fully human in Turkish news discourse and what these portrayals reveal about contemporary notions of Turkish nationhood. I focus on the linguistic and rhetorical strategies through which refugees are rendered socially acceptable and legitimate and discuss the tensions, shortcomings, and paradoxes of these humanitarian modes of representation.
Of the 2,285 news items that were analyzed, 66 percent concern Syrian refugees. This is followed by Afghan refugees, who comprise 3 percent of the total, and Iraqi refugees, who account for 1 percent. In 21 percent of the news items, the refugees’ nationality or country of origin is not specified. When the distribution of news items according to themes is analyzed, the themes of “foreign policy” (27 percent), “migration journey” (20 percent), “victimization” (20 percent), “children” (17 percent), and “aid” (16 percent) stand out. Only 1.5 percent of news items are coded under the theme of “success stories.” Crime news is at a remarkable rate of 8 percent; in one out of two crime stories, the perpetrator is a refugee.
Refugees are mentioned as a collective mass in the large majority (85 percent) of news items. Of the coverage, 40 percent is framed through a “threat–security–control” lens, 32 percent through a “humanitarian–moral” lens, 16 percent through an “economy and development” lens, 7 percent through a “culture and integration” lens, and 3 percent through a “religious–moral” lens. To assess the overall tone of each news item, I examined whether the account of events and issues was dominated by negative or positive elements – for instance, whether it relied on expressions such as “chaos,” “burden,” “tragedy,” or “misery,” or, conversely, used affirming language like “friends,” “guests,” or “brothers.” When both positive and negative cues appeared in the same story, tone was coded based on the dominant emphasis. On this basis, approximately 70 percent of the items were coded as negative, 24 percent as positive, and 6 percent as neutral.
These figures already point to a structural ambivalence in Turkish media discourse. On the one hand, Syrian refugees, in particular, are addressed through a religiously inflected humanitarian vocabulary – “guests,” “brothers and sisters,” “people in need” – that echoes the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government’s ensar–muhacir (hosts–migrants) rhetoric and broader practices of “humanitarian diplomacy” (Altunışık Reference Altunışık2019). On the other hand, security-, threat- and crime-oriented frames normalize anxiety, resentment, and calls for control, mirroring the rise of bottom-up nationalism, digital racism, and anti-Syrian sentiment documented in social media studies (Bozdağ Reference Bozdağ2020). The figure of the “good refugee” emerges precisely at the intersection of these competing logics, offering a way to maintain a benevolent self-image of the Turkish nation while selectively humanizing only those refugees who embody particular gendered, moral, and classed virtues (Korkut Reference Korkut2016).
In what follows, a close reading was conducted of a subset of news items that form an intersectional cluster of humanitarian and positive representations (n = 60). From this sample, three dominant discursive patterns emerged. First, child and women refugees occupy a more privileged position in media representation than male refugees. Second, young male refugees are recognized in heroic moments where they disregard their own lives and, ideally, save the life of a national. Third, a smaller but significant group of stories foregrounds refugees’ talents, extraordinary achievements, and superior qualities. These three figures – the vulnerable woman/child, the heroic young man, and the talented/entrepreneurial refugee – are not only humanitarian types; they are also key sites where contemporary Turkishness is narrated and re-imagined.
“Women and children first!”
Women and children are the primary and most frequently mobilized protagonists in news stories that represent refugees within a humanitarian framework. In one-quarter of the 2,285 news items analyzed, refugee children or women appear as at least one of the subjects or actors. The right to education and access to healthcare for refugee women and children are among the most frequently covered issues, especially in the more rights-sensitive left-wing press. For instance, a Birgün articleFootnote 2 examines the problems faced by Alevi refugee women fleeing jihadist groups in Syria and seeking refuge in Turkey, through individual testimonies about healthcare and housing; the title, “Women who do not exist,” already signals the erasure at stake. A Cumhuriyet articleFootnote 3 titled “Humanity on the edge” emphasizes that one out of every three Syrian children is not vaccinated against polio and measles and highlights the vital needs of Syrian children.
The paradigmatic case here is the circulation of the photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed ashore on the Turkish coast in September 2015. Taş (Reference Taş2017) offered an in-depth analysis of how Turkish media covered the event, while Bozdağ and Smets (Reference Bozdağ and Smets2017) examined its treatment in Turkish and Belgian online publics. De-Andrés-del-Campo et al. (Reference de-Andrés-del-Campo, Nos-Aldas and García-Matilla2016) demonstrate how this powerful image became a catalyst for social transformation. In Turkey, almost all newspapers ran headlines such as “Humanity washed ashore,” “Shame on the world,” and “Where are you, conscience?”, echoing what Chouliaraki and Zaborowski (Reference Chouliaraki and Zaborowski2017) identify in the European press as a shift toward personalized and humanitarian coverage that nonetheless fails to politicize the structural conditions of the “refugee crisis.” Instead of prompting reflexive critique of border regimes, the coupling of personalization and emotionalization displaces political responsibility into a sentimentalized spectacle of suffering (Chouliaraki and Zaborowski Reference Chouliaraki and Zaborowski2017, 624).
The problems faced by child refugees are particularly susceptible to dramatization, sensationalization, and emotionalization. Many news articles that frame child refugees in a positive light slide easily into axes of benevolence, pity, and helplessness. Images intensify this effect: photographs of refugee children who are cold, hungry, injured, or raising their hands in apparent surrender – or, at best, smiling at the camera because they are reaching out for help. Typical examples include reports about a doctor couple who settled a Syrian family with four children in their vineyard house,Footnote 4 or a story accompanied by a photograph of six children freezing barefoot in front of a tent under the snow.Footnote 5 “This is how we were brought up, and as a nation, we are like this; we are charitable. Let the nations of the world hear it,” commented the doctor who “saved” the refugee family, which revealed the role of benevolence playing in the construction of an idealized nationhood.
A Birgün article (March 24, 2016) titled “Syrian children’s cry for help became the photograph of the year” features a boy covered in blood, dust, and dirt, looking directly at the camera with an expression of pain. While the child’s tearful facial expression signifies helplessness, the “cry for help” text beneath the photograph reinforces and anchors this meaning (Barthes Reference Barthes1977, 39). Another widely circulated photograph, taken by the photojournalist of the Türkiye newspaper in the Atme camp, shows a little girl who mistakes the camera for a weapon and raises her hands in surrender, her face filled with fear.Footnote 6 The fearful and helpless gaze of Hüda, as she is named in the caption, affirms the refugee subject’s passivity and vulnerability. There is little doubt that these reports are intended to mobilize human values and emotions. Yet the framing of women and children as quintessentially vulnerable constructs them primarily as objects of the benevolent gaze of the host rather than as political subjects of migration.
This situation illustrates the paternalistic and nationalized perspectives toward refugees in Turkey. Refugees – at times imagined as our brothers and sisters or as ensar, and at other moments as part of a responsibility extending from the Ottoman past to the present – are constructed as pitiable subjects in need of Turkish benevolence and care (Drewski and Gerhards Reference Drewski, Gerhards, Drewski and Gerhards2024; Korkut Reference Korkut2016). This language also resonates with the AKP’s humanitarian migration discourse, which codes Turkey and Erdoğan as the compassionate protectors of Islam and the umma (the global Muslim community). This humanitarian approach entails a dual discursive operation: on the one hand, by humanizing some refugees, it affirms the moral superiority, generosity, and compassion of the Turkish nation; on the other hand, it emotionalizes and moralizes the issue by relegating to the background legal problems, debates on women’s, children’s, and citizenship rights, child labour and labour exploitation, and structural issues such as human trafficking and sex work. Elsewhere, Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2001) perceptively notes that the moralization of matters related to emancipation and justice narrows the political field and nourishes an anti-political authoritarianism. Moreover, as Fassin (Reference Fassin2012, 169) argues, moralizing a cause often leads to moral judgments about what is more or less defensible, reinforcing existing moral distinctions in society. In the Turkish context, this moralization functions not only as a narrative about the Other, but also as a mechanism in the construction of a Turkishness endowed with moral superiority.
Young refugee men as heroes
In the Turkish context, a crucial hegemonic discourse about Syrian men has been the accusation that those who “fled” the war are cowards who lacked the courage to defend their country (Gökarıksel and Secor Reference Gökarıksel and Secor2020; Öcal et al. Reference Öcal, Gökarıksel and Aykaç2024). Refugee men are frequently stigmatized as idle, dangerous, or unmanly in both mainstream media and everyday talk (Sözer Reference Sözer2021). Recent work underlies the sexualized and gendered character of the political representation of migration (Fassin Reference Fassin2012, 145) and shows how racialized and gendered depictions of refugee men in Turkey construct them as threatening Others and legitimate calls for tighter border control (Öcal et al. Reference Öcal, Gökarıksel and Aykaç2024). Against this background, one of the few moments when young refugee men come closest to being recognized as fully human is in heroic narratives that reverse the stigma of cowardice. Popular journalism is drawn to stories of heroism, particularly accounts of ordinary people exhibiting extraordinary courage (Langer Reference Langer1998). In the corpus examined here, the theme of the “refugee hero” appears frequently in news stories that portray refugees in a positive light. Gestures of altruism and benevolence are often framed as heroism (Franco et al. Reference Franco, Blau and Zimbardo2011). For example, the story of twenty-one-year-old Iraqi refugee Alsamarrai, who gives his shoes to a barefoot child and walks home barefoot, runs under the headline “Barefoot hero found.”Footnote 7 During the 2020 earthquake in Elazığ, multiple newspapers covered at length the story of Syrian university student Mahmoud al-Osman, who helped rescue a couple trapped under the rubble with his bare hands: “Syrian university student Mahmud’s reunion with Dürdane and Zülfük Aydın, whom he dug out of the rubble with his hands, was flooded with tears.”Footnote 8 The articles, illustrated with large photographs on the front and inside pages, praise Mahmoud’s heroism in risking injury and death. The following day, headlines announce that the President will grant citizenship to the heroic young man, accompanied by a photograph of Mahmoud embracing the Minister of Interior.Footnote 9 In this photograph, Mahmud, embraced by the “compassionate arms” of the state in the person of Minister Soylu, rests his head on Soylu’s shoulder. Together with the promise of citizenship and the emphasis on brotherhood in the caption accompanying this scene, in which Soylu closes his eyes in a mix of content and happiness, the image offers a near-perfect single-frame illustration of paternalism.
Other examples of heroic migrants in international media include Sow, a Senegalese migrant who rescued a disabled man from a burning house in Spain; Gassama, a Malian migrant who saved a child hanging from a balcony in Paris; three Syrians who captured terror suspects in Germany and handed them over to the police; and Bathily, a Malian migrant who protected customers during an armed attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris.Footnote 10 In all of these cases, the heroes are young male migrants, and, in most, their actions are explicitly rewarded – or promised to be rewarded – with citizenship. If Agamben’s terminology is adopted, it is precisely the refugee’s willingness to renounce their biological (bare) life that grants them a claim to social and political life (Fassin Reference Fassin2012).
These heroic narratives are deeply revealing of the gendered and nationalized conditions of belonging in Turkey. By disregarding their own lives for the sake of saving a Turkish citizen or protecting Turkish property, heroic refugees temporarily inhabit the role of the ideal national subject: brave, self-sacrificing, loyal. Their heroism symbolically repairs the presumed deficit of masculinity associated with “fleeing” the homeland, yet this repair is highly conditional. Citizenship and social recognition appear not as rights grounded in shared humanity but as moral rewards for exceptional sacrifice. This logic mirrors broader citizenship debates in which refugees’ worthiness is constantly evaluated and in which bottom-up forms of nationalism demand gratitude and obedience from Syrians in exchange for hospitality. The “heroic refugee” thus enables Turkish society to affirm its own values – courage, sacrifice, and hospitality – while preserving the notion that ordinary, non-heroic refugees remain morally suspect and potentially undeserving.
The talented refugee
A third cluster of news items celebrates refugees’ artistic, academic, or sporting talents, achievements, and successes. Almost all of these stories praise refugees’ outstanding abilities and emphasize their contributions to Turkish society. Yet the talented and exceptional refugee is implicitly compared with the “ordinary” refugee who lacks such distinction. In other words, these narratives suggest that some refugees can merit sympathy and inclusion because they embody middle-class, meritocratic ideals.
Academic achievements, first places in examinations, and prestigious awards serve as important gateways into humanitarian representation. One report celebrates the Médicis Prize, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, which was granted to a Syrian refugee journalist who fled the civil war.Footnote 11 In these and similar items, refugees’ occupations and higher education before displacement are constantly stressed.Footnote 12 A Türkiye article (July 24, 2018) titled “Syrian Mahmut is the first in the faculty” begins with a familiar formula: “Mahmut El-Abrash, who fled the civil war, learned Turkish. He completed his unfinished education in the Mechatronics Department of Sakarya University. He ranked first in the faculty.” Another storyFootnote 13 focuses on twenty-three-year-old Roba Alislam Abousaleh, who fled Syria and is now studying at her third university in Turkey. The journalist emphasizes that Abousaleh took the Foreign National Student Examination and achieved top scores, explicitly countering rumours that Syrian students can enter university without examinations. The article details the departments she has completed and her rankings. The tone in such reports signals that well-educated, mostly white-collar refugees are seen as particularly deserving of the opportunities they receive.
Sporting achievements deserve separate discussion. Sport is one of the key popular arenas in Turkey where nationalist discourse is produced and disseminated (Blasing Reference Blasing2019; Kösebalaban Reference Kösebalaban2004). Stories about refugees’ sporting successes and their contributions to Turkish sport are often narrated within this nationalist framework. In a news item titled “Khan’s eye is on the national Jersey,”Footnote 14 it can be read that “21-year-old Afghan athlete Ali Khan Mirzahi, who fled the war in his country and took refuge in Turkey, now only thinks of winning medals for Turkey, the country which welcomed him.” Another report covers a refugee team that wins first place in the shooting category in an international competition.Footnote 15 A storyFootnote 16 about Syrian tennis coach Cevat Şükri, who took refuge in Turkey, is particularly revealing of the hierarchical and discriminatory language of the success discourse:
Syrian tennis player Cevat Şükri, who fled the war in his country and settled in Turkey, realized his dreams in İzmir. Şükri has been a tennis coach for three years. Thirty-year-old Jawad Shukri is one of the millions of Syrians who fled the war. The difference of Şükri is that he strives with all his strength to realize his unfinished dreams (emphases added).
Here, Şükri’s “difference” lies in his determination to pursue his dreams and contribute to Turkish sport and society. His value is measured not only in personal achievement but in his willingness to represent Turkey and to embody its ambitions on the court. In the news photograph, Şükri is depicted playing tennis, dressed in tennis attire, with long hair, an attractive appearance, and a broad, exuberant smile – figured as a Western subject – and this representation tells us something about the unstable, ebb-and-flow character of legitimacy. The positive portrayal of Şükri, who has achieved success in tennis – a Western sport in Turkey associated with a Western lifestyle – and who himself possesses a markedly Western appearance, also resonates with Turkey’s political fantasy of the West and Westernization. At the same time, the headline phrase “Turkey took care of us” carefully delineates the paternalistic and non-egalitarian boundaries of this acceptance.
Entrepreneurship is another powerful marker of social acceptability. Many stories highlight refugees who, despite losing their former status and resources, “start from scratch” in Turkey and rebuild their lives through hard work. A narrative prototype appears in the article “Syrian woman was homeless, now selling houses.”Footnote 17 It tells the story of Duaa Alhussain, who had to leave university and seek asylum in Turkey at the age of nineteen years. To make ends meet, she opens a small real-estate office in İstanbul, which quickly expands into a business providing services ranging from tourism to trade. “I first looked for a house,” she explains, “and then opened a small real-estate office to help fellow Syrians who had trouble finding housing. I grew my business in a short time. We turned from a small office into a company employing eight people with three branches in İstanbul.” The story is framed as a win-win situation: Duaa both embodies entrepreneurial self-reliance and contributes to the Turkish economy.
These narratives of talent, success, and entrepreneurship are not neutral. They articulate a neoliberal, humanitarian nationalism in which belonging is tied to productivity, self-improvement, and loyalty to the host nation. Refugees are praised when they become national assets: star students correcting misinformation about university entrance, athletes dreaming of the national jersey, and entrepreneurs creating jobs. In this neoliberal discourse, it is all about individual achievements (Wernesjö Reference Wernesjö2020, 400). In doing so, the stories reproduce a hierarchy of deservingness that resonates with global “good refugee” discourses, but they also speak directly to Turkish debates about modernization, competitiveness, and global visibility.
Ultimately, talent, success, and achievement stories implicitly tell us that to be considered fully human – and potentially worthy of inclusion in the national community – refugees must possess a “surplus” beyond bare life. The name of that surplus is extraordinariness. This brings us back to the fundamental questions raised by Arendt and Agamben about the human status of refugees and the supposed universality of human rights. In the Turkish case, the requirement of extraordinariness is layered onto an already ethno-religiously bounded conception of Turkishness, in which “real” or “ideal” citizens are imagined as hard-working, patriotic, and (Sunni) Muslim (Yabancı Reference Yabancı2022; Yilmaz Reference Yilmaz2021). The figures of the vulnerable woman/child, the heroic young man, and the talented refugee thus do more than humanize refugees; they help stabilize a moral and political image of the Turkish nation as simultaneously compassionate, modern, and sovereign, while leaving the majority of refugees outside the realm of unconditional humanity.
Conclusion
We are facing one of the biggest crises in human history. More than 115 million people are displaced worldwide, 35 million of whom are refugees. More than 10 percent of the world’s refugee population lives in Turkey. Caught between borders, countries, and legal statuses, these individuals need to be accepted as human beings, with social, legal, and political rights. This study started from this very point. First, Arendt and then Agamben explained why and how these groups who need human rights the most are not accepted as subjects of rights. By suggesting the “right to have rights,” Arendt underlined that one right that is really needed is to be a member of some kind of organized political community (DeGooyer et al. Reference DeGooyer, Hunt, Moyn, Maxwell and Taylor2020, 8). This implies that any declaration of human rights presupposes that human beings are already members of a community (Menke Reference Menke, Düwell, Braarvig, Brownsword and Mieth2014, 335). For Arendt, the politico-linguistic existence of human beings, which is a general characteristic of the human condition and a fundamental aspect of human dignity, serves as the starting point of this fundamental right. Fassin criticized humanitarian reason for failing to recognize the Other as a “face” (Levinas Reference Levinas1969), since recognizing this face – which resists any attempt to possess it – “also means recognizing a right beyond any obligation, and hence a subject beyond any subjection – even to humanitarian reason” (Fassin Reference Fassin2012, 254). Since, by looking at a face one sees “the uniqueness of the ‘Other,’ the inability to make another human being the same as you” (Cmiel Reference Cmiel1996, 101).
The present study demonstrated that for a refugee to be recognized as a human being, it is not enough to be “just human”; they must always possess or lack certain characteristics or commit specific deeds. In this sense, this study is in line with Pupavac’s (Reference Pupavac2008) finding that, according to the media discourse, only the hyphenated refugee deserves more protection: the refugee child; refugee woman; refugee student; refugee doctor; refugee athlete; refugee entrepreneur; and refugee hero. At the same time, it was observed that the positive attributes ascribed to the “good refugee” are, for the most part, also deployed reflexively in the construction of an ideal nationhood. The refugee’s positive qualities are actively employed and utilized in building a national self that is courageous, compassionate, merciful, just, and benevolent.
The study also demonstrated that discursive humanization strategies do not always lead to empowerment and subjectivation. First, these strategies valorize a minority of refugees by emphasizing their characteristics or extraordinary deeds while excluding large and “ordinary” masses. “The refugee” always needs a surplus to be recognized as (more) human, and this surplus is only defined through the characteristics of a very small, well-educated, elite minority. If I have those surpluses and perform well, I will be welcomed and recognized by my host, and I will be called by my name. Otherwise, I will be mostly treated as mere statistics. Second, humanization strategies can often veer towards victimization following the media’s dramatic, emotional, and sensationalist logic. The main pitfall of victimization is that it can trap us in anti-political, moral, and conscientious discourses. It may also lead to objectification of the so-called helpless refugee by the benevolent gaze.
The fact that newspapers that differ politically and ideologically largely converge in their definition of the “good refugee” can be linked to the relatively widespread and hegemonic position of humanitarian reason, which cuts across divergent ideological standpoints. This phenomenon may also be linked to the shrinking of the political sphere (Bauman Reference Bauman1999) and the moralization of issues that belong in the realm of politics (Brown Reference Brown2001). Distinct political projects come together around compassion, pity, and paternalistic protection. This is one of the inevitable consequences of pushing out of the political arena that ought to be politicized. After all, who could remain indifferent to a child forced to live in a tent in freezing cold, who would not sympathize with a doctor providing a roof to a refugee family, or who cannot admire a young man saving lives? Yet, political debate begins precisely when we start to interrogate the policies that make that child live under such social conditions, the structural inequalities and relations of domination and exploitation, and when we propose solutions to these structural problems grounded in rights, equality, and justice that also place relations of redistribution under scrutiny. It is at this point that division and disagreement begin. Politics begins where disagreement emerges (Rancière Reference Rancière1999).
This work has demonstrated the importance of continually politicizing and historicizing migration policies and refugee subjects, as well as the significance of acknowledging the uniqueness within larger social processes and the structural relations, hierarchies, and inequalities that underlie them. The author would be pleased to modestly contribute to the process of politicization.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on research supported by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye) under project number 119K256, titled “Political and Social Conceptualization of International Migration in Turkey.” The author appreciates TUBITAK’s support in facilitating this research.
Competing interests
None.
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