As part of the MAD project a new paper “Securitising the future: Dystopian migration discourses in Poland and the Czech Republic” has just been published in the prestigious journal “Futures” by Elsevier. The paper is authored by Dr Monika Bartoszewicz, Dr Otto Eibl, and Dr Magdalena El Ghamari, Collegium Civitas.

The authors look for answers to the following questions: what societal attitudes towards migration and migrants in Europe have Poles and Czechs adopted, which direction is the discourse on migration going in in Poland and Czech Republic and which type of risk associated with migration do we fear more – near or distant in the future.

The paper presents findings of a comparative study carried out in Poland and the Czech Republic, which analysed the societal attitudes towards migration and migrants in Europe. Our research shows that the reaction to migration in Poland and the Czech Republic constitutes a reversed (bottom up) securitisation. Moreover, contrary to the majority of security challenges where the immediate threats are understood to be more dangerous than those placed in a distant future, when it comes to securitised migration, the threat projection increases the further into the future it is cast, and immediacy loses its potency as a catalyst. Societal discourses on migration foresee a dismal future which becomes more and more dystopian with the passing time.

The publication is available free of charge in ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722000726?via%3Dihub

The paper is part of the MAD project – “Migrants. Analysis of media discourse on migrants in Poland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Albania and the Czech Republic” funded by NAWA – Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej.

More information about MAD: http://projectmad.civitas.edu.pl/about-project