Border Gates, Barbed Wires, Roads, Camps and Children: Refugee as a Victim and an Exception

Abstract

The event referred as The Refugee Crisis after 2015, the year that the European countries confronted with a huge migration wave, is rather a crisis of modernity. In this paper, the discourse created by the images most frequently used in media all over the world when depicting this crisis is examined; issues such as belonging, border, nation-state, home and homelessness, self and the other, freedom and confinement, history and ethics are discussed; and whether these images create the grounds for the viewers to attain a critical position towards this crisis as a crisis of modernity is discussed. It is concluded that these images help solve this crisis on behalf of modernity by representing this event as an exception of modernity rather than a consequence of it, reproducing the colonialist discourse.

Keywords

• Refugee
• Modernity
• Exception
• The Other
• Colonialism