Introduction: Refugee and Media—An (Un)healthy Nexus

The media are the transporter of news and views in the modern world, largely constructing our knowledge about what is happening around the world. Our knowledge is therefore shaped by the way in which the media supplies ‘stories’ to us (see Entman, 1989). Consequently, the media plays a vital role in molding our perspective and understanding of a particular issue, in terms of all its facts and facets. As such, the refugee crisis comes to us as a ‘news item’ accordingly to how the media wants us to understand it. The media, in both print and electronic forms, constructs refugees as an item of the ‘crisis’ story, and the readers ideally believe it and ‘take it for granted’ normatively without paying critical attention to what is actually going on in the real world (Wright, 2002). Therefore, refugees are mediated to the world community as a category of people in crisis rather than as victims of the systems crafted by others; particularly by the authoritarian states or the powerful organ of the society or the dominant country in the world. They are represented in the media according to the desires and motives of others, rather than those of the refugees themselves. At the same time, the media story is often premeditated according to the political tone and strategic carriage of the media house which is also, in many cases, a chunk of the system. The media therefore cannot deny its responsibility for portraying victims as ‘crisis’ in the representation of the refugee issues. Therefore, the way in which the refugee crisis is represented by the media also encompasses media politics which is an inescapable segment of the larger arrangement of the global political economy (Lawlor & Tolley, 2017). Given the background, there is an/a (un)healthy affiliation and nexus between media and refugees observed within the broader spectrum of representation and prognosis of the refugee crisis across the globe. The introductory chapter of the book sets out a framework for the central arguments paying particular attention to the politics of representation (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Hall, 2017) of the refugee crisis in the world. It offers an analytical framework of “representation,” “crisis framing,” and “ethics of care” with the case studies of three big refugee crises in contemporary times: the Syrian refugee crisis, the Rohingya refugee crisis, and the Afghan refugee crisis.