In this presentation, Abdelhady investigates Swedish mainstream newspapers’ coverage of the 2015 refugee crisis with particular emphasis on the connections made to Islam. Sharing research results on the frames used in newspaper coverage of Syrian refugees in Sweden, Abdelhady highlights the general emphasis on humanization, responsibility, benevolence and solidarity to meet the needs of increasing numbers of protection-seeking people. The positive framing, however, almost entirely disappears and is replaced with a predominantly negative one when the focus is brought to the discussion of Islam in the same context. Abdelhady shows that when focusing on the discussion of Islam in relation to the representation of refugees, the coverage shifts to emphasize security threats, cultural difference and othering. Thus, the dualism observed in portrayals of Syrian refugees is understood as a result of a desire to balance a humanitarian discourse with an exclusionary attitude towards Islam. This leads to the conclusion that, in mainstream newspaper discourses, hospitality and Islam are mutually exclusive frames marking the conditions of refugee reception.

This study examines racialization discourse and practices against Syrian refugees in Turkey through an everyday geopolitical perspective. Since the outbreak of Syrian civil war in 2011, Turkey has become a primary destination of Syrian refugees for either seeking asylum or staying temporarily until the war is over. Turkey hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees (approximately 3.6 million as of 2020) in the world since 2014. However, almost a decade after the arrival of the first Syrian refugees, the Turkish government has not initiated any systemic program for the social integration and employment of refugees. While initially living in refugee camps, the majority of Syrians have gradually moved to cities across Turkey to take care of themselves amid the lack of refugee policies and the everlasting waiting in limbo. Along with the growing visibilities of Syrians across the country, they ​have become the targets of criticisms and attacks by Turkish people who accuse Syrians of causing disorder and threat within the country, exploiting state’s resources, and stealing jobs. However, this turmoil against refugees cannot be explained merely with the rapid increase of population and visibilities of Syrians. In this thesis, ​I argue for approaching the discourses and practices against Syrians through the lens of racialization that enables accounting for anti-Arab racism as systemic and historical. The national imaginary which constructed the Arabs as the source of backwardness and anti-modernism has been a perpetual discourse that has been reproduced throughout the Republic’s history and arrived today as a widespread anti-Arab sentiment across different segments of the Turkish society. Employing a feminist geopolitical perspective, I argue that this narrative, which portrays Arabs as uncivilized, untrustworthy, greedy, and lazy, is powerfully at work in the current reactions against Syrians. Focusing on the discourses around work ethics, civilization, sexuality, and hygiene, this thesis demonstrates how everyday discrimination and racialization practices against Syrians, re-enact the historical national imaginaries which build hierarchies among nations and construct the Turkish national identity through the othering of Arabs. As such, this puts the racialization literature into conversation with the scholarship of feminist geopolitics and reveals how racialization of bodies, behaviors and habits of Syrians is simultaneously a territorial practice of differentiating Turkishness from Arabness and reproducing national hierarchies.