National Rhetorics in the Syrian Immigration Crisis: Victims, Frauds, and Floods

The Syrian refugee crisis seriously challenged countries in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. It provoked reactions from humanitarian generosity to anti-immigrant warnings of the destruction of the West. It contributed to the United Kingdom's "Brexit" from the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. This book is a unique study of rhetorical responses to the crisis through a comparative approach that analyzes the discourses of leading political figures in ten countries, including gateway, destination, and tertiary countries for immigration, such as Turkey, several European countries, and the United States. These national discourses constructed the crisis and its refugees so as to welcome or shun them, in turn shaping the character and identity of the receiving countries, for both domestic and international audiences, as more or less humanitarian, nationalist, Muslim-friendly, Christian, and so forth. This book is essential reading for scholars wishing to understand how European and other countries responded to this crisis, discursively constructing refugees, themselves, and an emerging world order.

Clarke Rountree is Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Working primarily in legal and political rhetoric, he has published dozens of essays and five books, including Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore, which won the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism.

Jouni Tilli is Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. His dissertation on clerical war rhetoric won the Best Dissertation Award (University of Jyväskylä), and his monograph Suomen pyhä sota (Finland’s holy war) won the 2014 Christian Book of the Year Award (Finland). In 2017 he was given the Emerging Scholar Award by the Kenneth Burke Society.