Aylan and Colonia. From the War against Migrants to the War against Refugees

Abstract

 Recent EU migration policies, traditionally centred on migrants’ mobility governance, have increasingly been focused, since 2015,on the managing of the so-called refugee crisis. This transition has been accompanied by a new discursive and visual representation of migration, within which the impressive image of Aylan Kurdi and the chaotic and confused images of the Sylvester Night in Colonia, in 2015, take a significant role. This article analyses the impact of these two events, as they were narrated by the media, by identifying a nonlinear process which has led from the perception of a migrant crisis to the one of a refugee crisis and, consequently, from the implementation of EU anti-migration policies to the implementation of anti-refugee policies.