(Un)deserving victims : the race-gender-geopolitics nexus of migration discourses in Poland

Abstract

What makes some displaced populations deserving protection more than others? I discuss this complex problem in a critical analysis of discursive narratives, presented by Polish authorities about the situation on its two Eastern borders between 2021 and 2023. I propose the race-gender-geopolitics nexus of intersectional analysis to reveal how and why migrants on the Polish-Belarusian border were presented as threatening and ingenuine as asylum-seekers, and Ukrainians became real ‘war refugees’. While the identified narratives corresponded with the existing studies on the influence of race and gender on perceived deservingness and victimisation, considering geopolitics offers a novel, context-specific analytical layer of discourse production. I thus move beyond the ‘deserving/undeserving’ binary, complicating the picture with other groups of displaced people, often silenced in the analysed representations. I demonstrate how the widespread post-colonial, racializing and patriarchal attitudes have been intertwined with regional geopolitical goals and relations with neighbouring countries. For Poland, these are the aspirations to anchor its position within the West, as well as its complicated history with Russia and Belarus but also Ukraine. I argue that all of that, coupled with the long-standing antimigrant attitudes, resulted in particular discourses about the incoming people.