Alexandra Pinto Damas, Apr 12 2021
In March 2016, the European Union (EU) and Turkey announced they would cooperate in managing the ‘migration crisis’ that resulted from the Syrian Civil War. According to the EU-Turkey Statement – also called EU-Turkey Refugee Deal -, every new ‘irregular’ migrant that cannot apply for asylum in Greece is sent back to Turkey. Moreover, the great novelty of the Refugee Deal is the establishment of the so-called ‘one-to-one mechanism,’ in which the EU would accept a Syrian refugee for every other returned from the Greek islands to Turkey, taking into account the refugee’s particular vulnerability.[1] The Refugee Deal has been strongly criticised by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch. NGOs argue that refugees still live in dreadful circumstances on the Greek Islands, especially women and girls.[2][3] Moreover, it is argued that Turkey cannot be considered a safe country for asylum seekers and refugees since they do not have adequate access to integration or resettlement; neither can live in dignity.[4] One might wonder, thus, if the agreement, in fact, protects refugees or if it increases even more their insecurities. Furthermore, the fact that the EU concluded that the Refugee Deal was a proper tool to address the ‘migration crisis’ shows that the EU frames this crisis in a specific sense, with particular interests at stake.
It is important to point out that, at the time of the EU-Turkey Deal, discourses around Europe emphasised the need to assure the protection of European women from potentially aggressive male migrants, especially after 2015-16 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Germany.[5] Nevertheless, some refugees – women and children – were still considered as worthy of compassion, as an invocation of the ‘the white man’s burden’ to protect the colonised.[6] It is argued that these discourses and ideas played a role in defining who would be entitled to humanitarian protection under the EU framework and the underlying assumptions within the idea of protection. Thus, this paper asks to what extent the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal is based on a gendered and racialised logic of protection.[7]
In order to answer such a question, the paper is structured as follows: First, I explain the method of discourse analysis based on socially constructed meanings. Second, I address the conceptual framework applied in the paper, that is, the concepts of ‘intersectionality’, ‘human security’, ‘crisis,’ ‘continuum of violence’ and ‘logic of protection’. Third, I discuss the EU framing of the ‘migration crisis’ and its consequent policy effects within the Refugee Deal. Fourth, I address the continuum of violence experienced by the refugees under the EU-Turkey Deal. Fifth, I discuss the logic of protection within the public discourses at the time of the EU-Turkey Statement. Finally, the paper concludes that the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal is based on a gendered and racialised logic of protection that subordinates non-Western refugees to the EU masculinity, without effectively protecting them.
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