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Sweden’s online nation branding in times of refugee movement: A multimodal analysis of “Portraits of migration”
Abstract
Textual and visual analyses of nation-branding campaigns are rare but highly needed (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Hao, Paul, Trott, Guo, and Wu, 2019) as online media have become a popular tool for states to shape people’s perception (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011). In Anholt’s much applied nation brand hexagon (2007), immigration and investment, society, governance, and culture and heritage are, along with tourism and export, the core aspects that build a country’s reputation. As the 2015 refugee peak situation resulted in a more restrictive approach of the Swedish government towards asylum applicants, the country’s brand was put under pressure. How could Sweden’s values related to openness be highlighted while policymakers chose a deterrent road? In this study, we bridge streams of research on nation branding, framing, and migration studies by presenting a multimodal analysis of the “Portraits of migration” campaign as a strategic response to the refugee situation.
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The European refugee crisis is an important topic on media, political, and public agendas. Due to its scope and impact, its continuing prevalence on the media-agenda and the divisiveness of public debate, new research is needed to understand the media’s framing of the issue. This study inductively analyzes framing of the refugee crisis of 2015–2016 by two Dutch newspapers. Portrayal of the refugee crisis consists of ten different frames and counter frames. The frames are communicated on the level of the refugee, on the level of the crisis as an event, and on a societal level. Results show that recent reporting on the refugee crisis is relatively nuanced and portrays the crisis from a variety of perspectives. Framing changes following certain transitory events, but only slight differences were found between popular and quality papers.
This chapter will focus on how news media consumption and trust have an impact on attitudes about immigrants and refugees both in Belgium and Sweden. Moreover, we will analyze if and to what extent the level of importance of the migration issue and the presence of intergroup contact are mediators of news consumption. Generally, in Belgium the debate is more negative than in Sweden (De Cock et al., 2018). This study will also analyze if there are differences between Belgians and Swedes on attitudes about immigrants and refugees. We begin our research by outlining the theoretical frame, focusing on how news media and attitudes towards minority groups are linked. Subsequently, we outline the three research questions which ask whether or not there are any attitude differences between Belgium and Sweden, to what extent media consumption and media trust play a role in the formation of these attitudes, and how direct intergroup contact and the subjective importance of the migration issue relate to attitudes. In the section on data and methodology, we describe how our sample of 3000 respondents was collected and how we operationalized concepts such as media trust, news consumption, and the importance of the migration issue. Finally, we will present and discuss the results of the analyses, to end with a brief conclusion.
The topic of migration has become particularly contentious in national and international debates and media have a discernable impact on overall societal attitudes towards this phenomenon. Polls show time and again that immigration is one of the most important issues occupying people’s minds. This book examines the dynamic interplay between media representations of migrants and refugees on the one hand and the governmental and societal (re)actions to these on the other. This collection of interdisciplinary research, which largely focuses on Belgium and Sweden, attempts to unravel the determinants of people’s preferences regarding migration policy, expectations towards newcomers, and economic, humanitarian and cultural concerns about immigration’s effect on the majority population’s life. Whilst migrants and refugees remain voiceless and highly underrepresented in the legacy media, this volume allows their voices to be heard.
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In 2014, more than 200,000 refugees and migrants fled for safety across the Mediterranean Sea. Crammed into overcrowded, unsafe boats, thousands drowned, prompting the Pope to warn that the sea was becoming a mass graveyard. The early months of 2015 saw no respite. In April alone more than 1,300 people drowned. This led to a large public outcry to increase rescue operations.
Throughout this period, UNHCR and other humanitarian organisations, engaged in a series of largescale media advocacy exercises, aiming at convincing European countries to do more to help. It was crucial work, setting the tone for the dramatic rise in attention to the refugee crisis that followed in the second half of 2015.
But the media was far from united in its response. While some outlets joined the call for more assistance, others were unsympathetic, arguing against increasing rescue operations. To learn why, UNHCR commissioned a report by the Cardiff School of Journalism to explore what was driving media coverage in five different European countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK and Sweden.
Researchers combed through thousands of articles written in 2014 and early 2015, revealing a number of important findings for future media advocacy campaigns.
Most importantly, they found major differences between countries, in terms of the sources journalists used (domestic politicians, foreign politicians, citizens, or NGOs), the language they employed, the reasons they gave for the rise in refugee flows, and the solutions they suggested. Germany and Sweden, for example, overwhelmingly used the terms ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’, while Italy and the UK press preferred the word ‘migrant’. In Spain, the dominant term was ‘immigrant’. These terms had an important impact on the tenor of each country’s debate.
Media also differed widely in terms of the predominant themes to their coverage. For instance, humanitarian themes were more common in Italian coverage than in British, German or Spanish press. Threat themes (such as to the welfare system, or cultural threats) were the most prevalent in Italy, Spain and Britain.
Overall, the Swedish press was the most positive towards refugees and migrants, while coverage in the United Kingdom was the most negative, and the most polarised. Amongst those countries surveyed, Britain’s right-wing media was uniquely aggressively in its campaigns against refugees and migrants.
This report provides important insights into each country’s press culture during a crucial period of agenda-setting for today’s refugee and migrant crisis. It also offers invaluable insights into historical trends. What emerges is a clear message that for media work on refugees, one size does not fit all. Effective media advocacy in different European nations requires targeted, tailored campaigns, which takes into account their unique cultures and political context.
Since the late 1990s, nation branding has attracted a lot of attention from academics, professional consultants and government actors. The ideas and practices of nation branding are frequently presented by branding advocates as necessary and even inevitable in the light of changing dynamics of political power and influence in a globalised and media-saturated world. In this context, some have argued that nation branding is a way to reduce international conflict and supplant ethno-nationalism with a new form of market-based, national image management. However, a growing body of critical studies has documented that branding campaigns tend to produce ahistorical and exclusionary representations of the nation and advance a form of ‘commercial nationalism’ that is problematic. Importantly, the critical scholarship on nation branding has relied primarily on sociological and anthropological theories of nationhood, identities and markets. By contrast, the role of the media – as institutions, systems and societal storytellers – has been undertheorised in relation to nation branding. The majority of the existing literature tends to treat the media as ‘neutral’ vehicles for the delivery of branding messages to various audiences. This is the guest editors’ introduction to the Special Issue ‘Theorizing Media in Nation Branding’, which seeks to problematise this overly simplistic view of ‘the media’ and aims to articulate the various ways in which specific media are an integral part of nation branding. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and problematises both the enabling and the inhibiting potentialities of different types of media as they perpetuate nation branding ideas, images, ideologies, discourses and practices.
This article outlines a new perspective on the role of media in nation branding, drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s post-structuralist media theory. I argue that, following Baudrillard, we can see nation brands in a new light, namely, as simulacra which exist within a transnational media system for the creation, circulation and consumption of commodity-signs. In this capacity, nation brands shed their representational burden of standing in for the nation and, instead, operate as self-referential entities. I use the example of Brand Kosovo to provide illustrations for my theoretical points. However, while the case of Kosovo has its specificities, I propose that the theoretical claims presented here hold beyond its parameters. This article forms part of the Theorizing Media in Nation Branding Special Issue.
In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public life – various practical dispositions of action towards the misfortunes of migrants and refugees at Europe’s border. On the basis of empirical material from European news (June-December 2015), we construct a typology of visibilities of the ‘crisis’, each of which situates refugees within a different regime of visibility and claim to action: i) visibility as biological life, associated with monitorial action; ii) visibility as empathy associated with charitable action; iii) visibility as threat, associated with state security; iv) visibility as hospitality, associated with political activism; and v) visibility as self-reflexivity, associated with a post-humanitarian engagement with people like ‘us’. In conclusion, we argue that, important as these five categories of visibility are in introducing public dispositions to action towards the vulnerable, they nonetheless ultimately fail to humanise migrants and refugees. This failure to portray them as human beings with lives that are worth sharing should compel us, we urge, to radically re-think how we understand the media’s responsibility towards vulnerable others.
This article traces the limits of branding as a tool for (re)constructing nations as 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983). Drawing on examples from post-socialist Eastern Europe, I analyse discourses and practices of nation branding from a critical perspective, rooted in the theoretical traditions of political economy and cultural studies. Focusing more closely on branding campaigns implemented by post-Soviet Ukraine and post-war Kosovo — two nations seeking to assert themselves as independent actors on the global stage — I consider the impact of nation branding on national identities and democratic governance. I identify three interconnected limits of the branded national imagination as a structuring discourse for nation building. First, the branded national imagination is structured through its subjection to a foreign gaze; second, it is heavily dependent on commercial transnational media; and third, it produces branded national subjectivities that contradict the lived experiences of national populations. I argue that while nation branding effectively depoliticises national (re)definition, it may in fact serve to reinvigorate ethnic nationalisms in the post-socialist region. Finally, I suggest that although we must be aware of local histories and legacies, the post-socialist experience can inform our understanding of the structuring limits of the branded national imagination in other post-conflict and post-colonial contexts as well.
This article looks at how the Greek, German and British press have
addressed the issue of the refugee crisis in Europe. Using a mixed research approach
that combines corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this article examines 1340 articles
that were published online between 20 March and 31 May 2016 in Greece (Kathimerini,
To vima), Germany (Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the UK (The Guardian,
The Telegraph). The results presented by this article suggest that the press in all three
countries mostly presented the refugee crisis in numbers. Geographical qualifiers were
also deployed in the effort to broach this thorny issue, while the managerial aspect of
the refugee crisis, the critical issue of child refugees and the EU–Turkey agreement
were all among the most frequent topics covered by the press.
In this article we present a cross-national comparison of framing of the issue of the ‘Syria fighters’ in Flanders and the Netherlands. We examine this topic using inductive and deductive framing analysis and interpret the results in terms of the advocates expressing the frames and the newspapers they were published in. We argue that variation in frame use can be explained by considering the background and social identification of the frame advocates. Furthermore, the subject of the ‘Syria fighters’ is depicted as mostly relating to (Islamic) religious motives and the overall societal construction is relatively one-sided and problematized in a negative sense. This article serves as a preliminary step to a multi-level analysis of societal discourse on integration-related issues in online and offline networks, with an emphasis on Moroccan minorities in Flanders and the Netherlands.
On December 10, 2011, the first tweet was sent out from the @Sweden Twitter account, a nation-branding project financed by the Swedish government through the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden. Trumpeted by the media both in Sweden and internationally as an exercise in “transparent” and “democratic” nation-branding via the use of Twitter, the @Sweden account is “given” to a new Swede every week, and, supposedly, these curators are given free rein to tweet what they like, when they like. The use of a popular communication channel by the Swedish government—in this case, Twitter—provides an illuminating example of the carefully planned and managed promotion and nation-branding of Sweden, presented under the guise of a “transparent” and “democratic” selection and editorial processes. The @Sweden project will be addressed in light of “liberation technology” (Diamond, 201011.
Diamond , L. 2010. Liberation technology. Journal of Democracy, 21(3): 69–83. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) and “technology discourse” (Fisher, 201012.
Fisher , E. 2010. Contemporary technology discourse and the legitimation of capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 13: 229–252. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) perspectives, within which a correlation between access to, and use of, technology and proactive change is postulated. These theoretical perspectives are particularly valuable when heeding Kaneva's (201119.
Kaneva , N. 2011. Nation branding: Toward an agenda for critical research. International Journal of Communication, 5: 117–141. [Web of Science ®]View all references) call for a more critical, communications-based understanding of nation-branding.
ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: This article empirically assesses the importance for nations of key institutional, economic and societal factors for attracting internationally mobile skilled professionals from abroad. It examines the existing literature on international talent mobility and empirically tests the validity of nation branding as a strategy for attracting internationally mobile skilled professionals.
DESIGN: We use secondary data from the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Martin Prosperity Institute to test six hypotheses concerning factors that attract internationally mobile skilled professionals to a foreign country to live and work.
FINDINGS: The study finds that conditions of employment, quality of life, good governance, and tolerance towards people of diverse backgrounds are key issues that need to be holistically emphasized in successful nation branding campaigns aimed at attracting highly skilled professionals from abroad.
ORIGINALITY / VALUE: We use strong secondary data to reduce common method bias in the results which show that “macro” factors sway internationally mobile skilled professionals to favor some countries over others. We contribute to the literature on international talent flows by conceptualizing nation branding as a framework through which a variety of push and pull factors can be examined to entice and attract internationally mobile skilled professionals to a particular host-country. The findings will apply to several different types of skilled professionals including self-initiated expatriates, self-initiated corporate expatriates, and third country nationals and local foreign hires.
This conceptual article proposes a new integrative model of the country image by drawing on advances from the fields of business studies, social psychology, political science, and communication science. To interrelate different approaches, a communication management perspective is applied, providing a basic terminological framework systemizing the central constructs of country image, country reputation, country brand, and country identity. On this basis the authors develop the ‘4D Model' of the country image by integrating well-established concepts from national identity theory, attitude theory, and reputation management. The new model is suited for application in comparative analyses of country images both on the level of different groups (such as a country’s domestic and foreign publics) as well as different societal levels (such as individual attitudes on the one hand and mass-mediated prestige information on the other).
Visual elements are central components of current political communication. Visual portrayals, for example, convey cues and attributes that can affect the perceived credibility, truthfulness, and suitability of politicians. The pervasive use of images in politics has made visual political communication an important research area. Yet, analyses in the field predominantly use content analyses to examine the valence of visual portrayals. The present study investigates how the audience actually interprets visual cues and composition elements in the images of politicians and compares the results with the findings of content analyses. A card-sorting technique (Q-sort) and qualitative interviews are employed to capture subjective and intuitive interpretations of 33 color photographs of a politician. When compared with the attribute measurements of previous content analyses, the results show a strong accordance in the audience interpretation and the attribute analysis regarding an unfavorable political depiction. However, the findings indicate disagreement about the composition of a favorable depiction.
The main purpose of this study was to shed light on methodological problems in the content analysis of media frames. After a review of 5 common methods, we will present an alternative procedure that aims at improving reliability and validity. Based on the definition of frames advanced by R. M. Entman (1993), we propose that previously defined frame elements systematically group together in a specific way. This pattern of frame elements can be identified across several texts by means of cluster analysis. The proposed method is demonstrated with data on the coverage of the issue of biotechnology in The New York Times. It is concluded that the proposed method yields better results in terms of reliability and validity compared to previous methods.
Dealing with refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. We examine how media images of asylum seekers have framed ensuing debates during two crucial periods over the past decade. By conducting a content analysis of newspaper front pages we demonstrate that asylum seekers have primarily been represented as medium or large groups and through a focus on boats. We argue that this visual framing, and in particular the relative absence of images that depict individual asylum seekers with recognisable facial features, associates refugees not with a humanitarian challenge, but with threats to sovereignty and security. These dehumanising visual patterns reinforce a politics of fear that explains why refugees are publicly framed as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does not generate a compassionate political response.
This article examines the efforts of post-communist Romania and Bulgaria to reinvent their national images through the use of nation branding. After the collapse of communism in 1989, former communist nations experienced significant political, economic and cultural turmoil, accompanied by a deeply felt need for national self-redefinition. Nation branding programs were intended to articulate a new image for external consumption and, at the same time, to revive national pride at home. Adopting a critical interpretive approach, this article analyses comparatively the symbolism in two branding campaigns in Romania and Bulgaria. The analysis teases out tensions and contradictions in the advertising texts to generate insights about the politics of image creation and symbolic commodification in the post-communist context. The authors find that the campaigns appropriate national identity for the purposes of neoliberal globalization. This appropriation constrains national imaginaries within an ahistorical, depoliticized frame, resulting in a form of national identity lite. In this way, nation branding also serves to foreclose democratic avenues for national redefinition. •
In this article an empirically oriented conceptualization of frames is developed, using the issue of asylum and illegal immigration in the Belgian press as a test case. The methodological focus of this study is on the question of how these frames can be detected in the coverage. How can they be defined independently of the researcher’s perspective, knowing that the naming of frames in itself already involves a kind of framing? Two frames are reconstructed and deductively ‘measured’ by a content analysis: on the one hand, ‘asylum-seekers are innocent victims’ and, on the other hand, ‘asylum-seekers are intruders’. In the second phase, this article examines to what extent eight Belgian newspapers used these two frames to cover the issue of asylum. A homogeneity analysis by means of HOMALS is introduced in the framing research. It turns out to be a fruitful way to establish the frames in the news more precisely. The construction of indices made it possible to explore the evolution of the use of frames over time. Surprisingly, the Christmas mood was a factor that caused a frame-shift and it even led to a media hype.
This article discusses the growing body of research on nation branding, arguing for an expanded critical research agenda on this topic. It begins with an extensive overview of scholarly writing on nation branding, based on 186 sources across disciplines. The discussion organizes the sources in three categories, teasing out key themes within and across them. Second, the article proposes a reflexive conceptual map which identifies four types of research orientations across disciplines. Finally, some directions for future critical research on nation branding and its implications are outlined. The ultimate goal of this mapping exercise is to stimulate more work informed by critical theories on the global phenomenon of nation branding. 1 Anholt claims that he coined the term "nation branding" in 1996 (earthspeak.com, n.d.). He is undoubtedly the most prolific author on the subject (e.g., Anholt, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2007, 2008), and he has played a key role in establishing nation branding through consulting practice, speaking engagements, and efforts to institutionalize it as an academic field with scientific legitimacy. Another "founding father" of nation branding is Wally Olins, also a British brand consultant, whose work for governments, speaking engagements, and publications (e.g., Olins, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005) are commonly referenced.
During the period of exceedingly critical news coverage surrounding the Monica Lewinsky debacle, President Bill Clinton's job approval ratings were at some of the highest levels they reached during his tenure in office. Given this public response, many pollsters, pundits, and scholars argued that news coverage of the scandal must have been largely irrelevant to the public. Our view counters these claims by advancing a theory that recognizes that citizens' political preferences are influenced substantially by frames and cues provided by news media. To test our ideas, we draw upon three types of data, all from January 1993 to March 1999: ( a ) a longitudinal content analysis of major news media, ( b ) a time-trend of opinion polls on presidential job approval, and ( c ) monthly estimates of real disposable personal income, seasonally adjusted. Analyses reveal that news media emphasis upon and framing of certain issue regimes—to the framing of the scandal in terms of the strategic motives of conservative elites.
Open access article - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1748048520913462
Abstract: The construction of certain country images and identities is traditionally studied in relation to public diplomacy, strategic communication and nation branding practices of state and non-state actors. However, we notice the increased instrumentalization of country images and identities in debates on issues beyond strategic promotional practices, such as those articulated around elections, referendums or migration. We analyse how Swiss media constructed Switzerland's image and identity in the debate following the 2014 referendum on ‘stop mass immigration’ initiative, in times of populism, a communication phenomenon and ideology discursively articulated by political and media actors. Thus, we: (1) bridge streams of research on country images, identities, migration and populism that have yet to be integrated; (2) propose critical discourse analysis to identify specific discursive strategies (offering insights into alternative methodologies for studying populist political communication content and style); (3) highlight the role of media in reproducing populist discourses on country images and identities.
Purpose
Despite the growing interest by scholars, practitioners and public policymakers, there are still divergent and fragmented conceptualizations of nation branding as the field is still developing. In response, the purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize nation branding research and to provide directions for future research.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review peer-reviewed theoretical and empirical journal articles published during the last two decades – from 1998 to 2018. Selected journal articles on nation branding were subsequently synthesized for further insights.
Findings
The field of nation branding is fragmented and has developed in the course of the last two decades in different directions. This paper identifies key publication outlets and articles, major theoretical and methodological approaches and primary variables of interest that exist in the nation branding literature. The findings also highlight several research themes for future research.
Originality/value
This research fills a need to summaries the current state of the nation branding literature and identifies research issues that need to be addressed in the future.
In this article, the authors analyse the news photojournalism of the 2015 European migration ‘crisis’ as a political encounter between western publics and arriving migrants, where the latter are not simply ‘the represented’ but people who act within the photographic space. Inspired by Azoulay’s view of photography as ‘civic duty’, where ‘those represented continue to be present there at the time they are being watched in the photograph’ and, in so doing, actively call for a response from their publics, the authors ask the question of who acts and how as well as what bonds of civic duty such action puts forward for those publics. At the heart of these questions on agency lies a conception of arriving migrants as specifically vulnerable actors – people whose very precarity becomes a resource for meaningful action. This visual analysis of front-page news images across nine western countries, (84 images in June–November 2015) demonstrates that their photojournalism of migration enables two types of political encounters with arriving migrants: ‘action on migrants’, where migrants are mainly acted upon within the procedural encounters of border institutions, and ‘action by migrants’, where migrants act upon and affect others within existential encounters that can potentially touch upon people’s emotional and activist sensibilities. While, in line with the canons of photography and migration studies, both types of political encounters restrict precarious agency within the binary positions of victimhood and threat, it is the latter, ‘action by migrants’ that has the potential to break with such binaries and cast vulnerability as resistance – as deliberate exposures of the body to the power of the border, which present migrants as political actors in activist practices of transnational solidarity.
News photos of refugees and migrants tend to be highly evaluative since they capture the moments of human suffering, vulnerability and helplessness. Informed by the works of Martin and White (2005) and Economou (2009, 2008) on Appraisal Theory and evaluative stance, the current paper identifies the visual evaluative resources in Reuters’ Pulitzer-winning photos of refugees and migrants’ crisis in Europe for the year 2016. When considering photos evaluative stance, this paper argues, news photos should not be merely viewed as witness or proof of the events, rather they should be acknowledged for their aesthetic properties and compositional perspectives. This marks the importance of introducing delicate refinements to Martin and White's (2005) APPRECIATION model by adding, replacing and removing subcategories to account for the range of visual resources deployed in the photos under discussion. Photos’ visual cues and semiotics codes are added to the APPRECIATION model. Doing so, a distinction between the evaluative stances infused by photos aesthetical properties and those arising from photos'content and the depicted participants is established. Two authorial voices are then proposed: the Witness voice and the Artist voice. The delicate modifications introduced to the APPRECIATION model helps to dig deep into the embedded evaluative stance of the photos. Applying the suggested APPRECIATION resources, it is found that Pulitzer-winning photos aestheticize the suffering of the refugees and render it beautiful and photogenic. However, the evoked positive APPRECIATION resources instantiate negative JUDGEMENT values of social exclusion, impersonalization, and Otherness.
In this article I will present and discuss the Swedish virtual embassy as a new example of nation branding. By exploring the development of the Swedish embassy in Second Life, activities arranged by and involving the virtual embassy as well as the surrounding discourse of international mainstream media and people engaged in the development of Second Life, I will analyse the significance of the virtual environment in this virtual nation-branding project. I argue that the most important achievement of the Swedish virtual embassy was reached through the connection with the virtual environment in the coverage of traditional international mass media and that the key dimension, although not the only one, of the virtual world in branding Sweden was to serve as a fresh and influential brand signifier within the marketing project.
This article maps and analyzes quantitatively how the Scandinavian news press covered the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis. Our analysis shows that in the coverage of the migration events, Denmark and Sweden occupy polar positions in terms of their newspapers’ emphasis, with the former appearing more negative towards the refugees, and the latter more positive. The Norwegian case is found in between these. Danish print media more often mention the negative economic consequences of the arrivals, and Swedish the positive moral ones, while Norway appears to occupy a middle ground in the Scandinavian discourse. We also find that the Scandinavian press writes less often about the negative consequences of refugees coming than the European press in general. However, the humanitarian aspects of the crisis became less prominent in the Scandinavian press over time, as in the rest of Europe.
This comparative content analysis of Belgian and Swedish newspaper coverage of the ‘refugee situation’ in 2015 (N=898) revolves around responsibility indicators, news actor characteristics, and thematic emphasis. As they are a potential influential factor in the public-opinion formation process, the studying of media portrayals is an essential first step in investigating the dynamic interplay between media discourse and societal reactions. Belgium and Sweden differ with respect to migration policy, integration indicators, and the number of incoming refugees. They also differ in terms of journalistic cultural values. As a result, they make for an excellent case study of intercultural differences and similarities in how refugees are reported on. Our analysis made clear that Belgian news coverage shows regional diversity, with Francophone Belgian journalists showing more tolerance towards migrants and thus tending to be more in line with their Swedish counterparts. Still, refugees are seldom allowed to speak for themselves. This warrants attention and action by news professionals.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the communication management of the Swedish and Norwegian Governments during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. It does so in the context of recent debates into public diplomacy (PD) and nation branding, on the understanding that governments seek to manage their reputations in order to attract trade, investment and tourism, as well as generate broader interest in their policies and values.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based upon a case study of each country’s response, and draws upon qualitative interviews and document analysis.
Findings
The study finds that more than a decade of advances in PD can be readily adapted to negative branding aimed at dissuading undesired publics. However, opportunities remain for communication professionals to ensure that brand values are not discarded.
Originality/value
The study is among the first to examine the contemporary PD and nation branding apparatus when it is used to dissuade and even repulse target groups. It therefore explores some important issues related to communication management in the public sector.
Research indicates that news images of refugees have become increasingly negative, often portraying them as either innocent victims, who lack political agency, or as security threats, with the potential to threaten the host country's national security and identity. This article explores how Syrian refugees have been visually portrayed in the U.K. online media by employing a visual quantitative content analysis of 299 photographs of Syrian refugees in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent. It looks at photographs published after images of Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, made global headlines. The findings suggest that Syrian refugees are regularly securitized and cast by the media as “Others” who exist in the state of exception.
Place branding is happening. A new field of practice and study is in existence and whatever we choose to call it there can no longer be any doubt that it is with us. This collection of intuitive and well-reserached articles examines how places and regions see themselves, and how they reflect this in their branding.
This article applies recent critiques of branding and marketing to a case study of the nation branding trend. We argue that critical approaches to brand "co-creation"-a reliance upon consumers to build and disseminate brand identity-help illuminate the ways in which nation branding serves as a technique of governance in the era of global capitalism. The article first considers the recent development of nation branding as a global phenomenon and then explores the details of one such campaign in post-socialist Slovenia. The case study illustrates the ways in which nation branding enjoins the populace to "live" the national brand, and to promulgate it nationally and internationally in the name of taking responsibility for the homeland's economic development. The article concludes with a consideration of the way in which nation branding's framing of the state as an "enterprise" fits with the logic of emerging forms of so-called commercial nationalism.
This article investigates innovations in public diplomacy and nation brands through the example of Sweden's Embassy in Washington, DC, the House of Sweden (HoS). The analysis explores the styles of communication and public outreach made possible by the interaction between its architectural design, brand values and public diplomacy applications. Aimed at practitioners and scholars with an interest in public diplomacy and nation brands, this article assesses the activities, impact and implications of the House as a platform for public diplomacy. In addition to using the HoS as a case study in its own right, the article discusses some of the unique events hosted there, as well as related experiments such as the Second House designed for virtual world Second Life.
The concept of the nation as a brand seems to excite visceral animosity in some people. This paper examines the history of the nation as a brand, and tries to understand why, in the light of clear historical evidence, so many people find the idea objectionable. It concludes that it is not the concept that they detest so much as the word brand, which appears for some people to have trifling and superficial implications unworthy of the national idea.
This article aims, within the constructionist paradigm, at integrating culture into the framing process. Four characteristics are important for this approach: the distinction between the event, the media content, and the frame; the explicit attention to the reconstruction of frame packages; the relationship between frame packages and cultural phenomena; and the interaction between frame sponsors, key events, media content, schemata, and the stock of frames. An elaborated framing model is presented, and, subsequently, the constructionist approach is compared with priming and agenda setting. Finally, the methodological implications are discussed, in order to develop a strategy to reconstruct frame packages.
L’approche constructionniste au cadrage: ramener la culture
Baldwin Van Gorp
Department of Communication Science, Radboud University Nijmegen, Pays-Bas
Since the violent collapse of former Yugoslavia, the ‘new’ nation-states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia have attempted to position themselves on the global map while seeking to create a distinctive ‘brand’ (national) identity. Drawing on a textual analysis of their official governmental websites, this article explores how these former Yugoslav states use the Internet to create and represent self-images for the world. The governmental websites analysed frame the nation as a ‘brand’ in that they employ advertising mechanisms to promote and sell their nations. Websites represent national territories, histories, products and citizens as commodities that can be sold to foreign investors and tourists. In this way, the former Yugoslav countries are transformed into brand-states that serve the function of relegating their citizens to the role of either exotic Others ready to be consumed by rich western tourists, or goods for foreign investment.
Asylum in the EU Member States: Record number of over 1.2 million first time asylum seekers registered in 2015
- Eurostat
Invandring i medierna – Hur rapporterade svenska tidningar åren 2010–2015 [Immigration in the media – How did Swedish newspapers report during the years 2010–2015]?
- J. Strömbäck,
- F. Andersson
- E. Nedlund
The visual dehumanisation of refugees. <https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2013.840769>
- R. Bleiker,
- D. Campbell
- E. Hutchinson
- X. Nicholson
Sweden: By turns welcoming and restrictive in its immigration policy
- A. Skodo
2.0. Strategy for the promotion of Sweden abroad. Sharing Sweden
- Sharing Sweden