Assemblages of Syrian suffering: Rhetorical formations of refugees in Western media

As the influx of displaced people around the world continues to grow, the international community has yet to settle on a solution. According to Bülent Diken (2004), society is unable to determine whether the refugee is truly a worthy subject of human rights or simply a criminal, making it all the more important to analyze the conflicting representations of refugees in mainstream media. This rhetorical analysis examines discourses within highly read and referenced articles from Western (U.S. and U.K.) media sources during the first wave of media coverage of the violence in Syria during the fall of 2012 until the spring of 2014. Western media discourse surrounding the Syrian civil war and more specifically the refugee crisis can be understood as an assemblage of meanings that may account for the confused, contradicting, and sometimes complementary representations of Syrian refugees (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Puar, 2007). The competing discourses of refugee experiences reflect a rhetorical element of the state of exception, recreating conditions of bare life and precarity through discourses of disposability. This paper explores the texture and implications of three distinct lines within the Western media assemblage of the Syrian refugee that represent displaced people 1) as a dangerous burden, 2) as disaster and humanitarian raison d’etre and 3) as a humanized subject. The analysis concludes with a reframing of the modernist, structuralist subject position of the refugee by reconceptualizing media representations as an assemblage to show how seemingly contradictory constructions can cooperate to perpetuate the refugees’ experiences as sacred and disposable (conventu sacer) .