Abstract
This article investigates media as ‘borderscapers’ that discursively shape state borders by representing human interactions with and at the borders and generating ‘borderscapes’ that imbue borders with social and political meaning. Empirically, the article focuses on a two-pronged border emergency in Poland, involving non-European irregularised migrants stranded at the frontier with Belarus and the arrival of millions of war refugees from Ukraine. It applies Foucauldian discourse analysis to the coverage by the pro-government wPolityce.pl and the watchdog OKO.press. The study uncovers four borderscapes: (1) the Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of invisibility’ (wPolityce.pl); (2) the Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of rejection’ (OKO.press); (3) the Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape without borders’ (wPolityce.pl); and (4) the Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape of assimilation’ (OKO.press). The article argues that these borderscapes are contingent on (1) who is seen to interact with a given border and how and why, and (2) each outlet's referential relation towards the state politics of belonging.
Introduction
This article examines how media in Poland cover the two-pronged emergency at the country's borders, involving non-European irregularised migrants stranded at the border with Belarus and the arrival of millions of war refugees via the Polish–Ukrainian frontier 1 . Specifically, it scrutinises ‘borderscaping’ discourses in which borders are contingently constituted as either fixed or flexible, impenetrable or porous, securitised or humanitarian. I argue that how borders are constructed depends on (1) who is seen to interact with a given border and how and why, and (2) each outlets’ referential relationship to the state politics of belonging.
Theoretically, I draw on literature on borders in the field of media and migration (e.g., Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2019; Chouliaraki and Musarò, 2017) to which I seek to contribute a notion of media as ‘borderscapers’ that discursively shape borders by mediating human interactions at and with the border. To develop this idea, I borrow from border studies the concept of ‘borderscape’, whereby state borders are constituted by interweaving ‘a multiplicity of discourses, practices, and human relations’ (Brambilla, 2015: 21). Due to its incorporation of human relations, the concept of ‘borderscape’ considers the multiplicity of actors and interactions. It thereby understands ‘who’ interacts with the border, ‘how’ and ‘why’ as empirical questions.
Methodologically, I conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to capture the varied ways in which media relate to state politics of belonging by focusing on two digital-born outlets that differ in their attitude towards the conservative-nationalist government under the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) party's leadership: (1) wPolityce.pl, invested in strengthening conservative identities and consolidating support for the PiS government (Klimkiewicz, 2021; Polynczuk-Alenius and Hartikainen, 2024), and (2) OKO.press, a nonpartisan watchdog. The article's empirical contribution, then, lies in its comparative analysis of how two radically different media outlets simultaneously construct two different borders of one state. This setup clearly showcases the malleability of borders which can be shrunken or extended, solidified or dissolved in each particular conjunction.
Context: 2021–2022 border emergencies
Following PiS's 2015 electoral victory on an anti-refugee platform (Polynczuk-Alenius, 2021), Poland has been refusing to accept refugees through EU-brokered relocation schemes. The arrival of two groups of migrants at Polish borders put this unwelcoming approach to the test. In summer 2021, several thousand non-European irregularised migrants became stranded at the Polish–Belarusian border, causing a humanitarian crisis. Then, millions of war refugees began arriving from Ukraine in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
In mid-2021, the Alexander Lukashenko's regime began facilitating a Belarusian migration route to the European Union (Fajfer, 2021). Consequently, Poland became the first EU member-state that some people fleeing Syria, Yemen and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, following the resurgence of Taliban, encountered. From August 2021, Belarusian border guards have organised thousands of illegal pushovers into Poland. The response of the Polish state has been threefold. Firstly, Polish border guards have been illegally pushing migrants back to Belarus (Grześkowiak, 2023). In so doing, both sides have ‘weaponised’ nature, forcing people to cross fast-moving rivers and navigate wild forests under harsh weather conditions, without food or shelter. This standoff has led to a humanitarian crisis in which at least 40 people are believed to have perished (Ciobanu and Wielinski, 2023). Secondly, further border securitisation and militarisation has included the construction of a 186 km-long fence paired with the establishment of an ‘electronic’ frontier, and the introduction in September 2021 of a ‘state of emergency’ in 183 localities near the border, whose de facto existence was prolonged until 1 July 2022 by legally dubious measures. This was paired, thirdly, with the curbing of public access to the border zone, which made news reporting prohibitively difficult for both national and international media (see Filipec, 2022).
Although the state's approach violates international human rights treaties and encroaches on civil liberties and press freedom, it enjoys considerable societal support (Pszczółkowska, 2022). This is so because the PiS government's framing of the crisis as an artificially generated part of a ‘hybrid operation’ against the EU, executed by the Belarusian regime but masterminded by the Kremlin, has fallen on fertile ground (Fajfer, 2021). 2 Indeed, the ‘truth claims’ propagated by the PiS government about a ‘hybrid operation’ dovetail with the Polish collective memory of Russian imperialism and the perception of Russia as an existential threat (see Pfoser, 2022).
While the standoff at the Polish–Belarusian border continued, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 pulled Poland into another border emergency: millions of people fleeing the war crossed into the country. Here, the initial reaction was very different. The PiS government opened not only the border but also public services, social provisions and the labour market, to the refugees, while the society rushed to help (Duszczyk and Kaczmarczyk, 2022; Pszczółkowska, 2022). Unlike the humanitarian crisis on the Polish–Belarusian border, largely absent from the media due to the curbing of public access to the borderzone, reporting about refugees arriving from Ukraine became a constant feature in the news stream.
In what follows, I analyse the ‘borderscaping’ discourses related to this two-pronged border emergency and reconstruct the ‘borderscapes’ they generate. I also argue that these are contingent on (1) who is seen to interact with a given border and how and why, and (2) the outlets’ referential relationship to the state politics of belonging, operationalised as the approach to the PiS government's ‘truth claims’ about the crises that underlie such politics. I advance this argument in four steps. Firstly, I draw on border studies to develop the notion of media as ‘borderscapers’, centring on human interactions with and at the border. Secondly, I unpack FDA as my methodological approach and introduce the empirical material. Thirdly, before concluding, I discuss the four borderscapes unearthed in the analysis and link them to the PiS government's ‘truth claims’ about the crises, in particular regarding ‘Russian imperialism’ and ‘borderlessness’.
Conceptual framework: Media as ‘borderscapers’
This section brings literature on media and migration that deals explicitly with borders together with border studies to introduce the notion of media as ‘borderscapers’. Connecting technologies and journalism, media and migration scholarship conceptualises the border as ‘mediated’ – encompassing ‘digitally mediated border practices that work to simultaneously protect “us” from, and care for, mobile populations’ (Chouliaraki and Musarò, 2017: 536) – or ‘digital’, because it combines ‘the digital systems of surveillance that materialise the territorial border and the media narratives that make up the textualities of the symbolic border’ (Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2019: 595). Without underestimating the importance of territorial borders with their attendant technologies, my approach aligns with the media and migration literature that brings into focus the ‘symbolic borders’ constructed by media accounts.
Chouliaraki and Georgiou (2020: 30) argue that most of literature in this field, especially following the mid-2010s ‘refugee crisis’, recognises that media are trapped in a binary that configures migrants as either victims in need of protection or threats to national security. Such media representations mirror the European regime of ‘humanitarian securitisation’, which fuses securitised care for ‘them’ with the militarised protection of ‘us’ (Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2017). Similarly, Musarò (2017) argues that reporting on borders typically binds migration with crisis, thereby exacerbating public anxiety and legitimising state policies and actions. Recently, however, migrants have increasingly been read as ‘pawns’ in the hands of Europe's adversaries, buttressing the need for continuous border securitisation irrespective of the cost to migrant lives (Avraamidou and Ioannou, 2023).
Similar patterns appear in the Polish media. While in the early years of post-communist transition representations of migrants were arguably more diverse (Grzymała-Kazłowska, 2009), migrants are represented primarily as threats in the wake of the ‘refugee crisis’, especially Muslims and particularly in the right-wing press (Kopytowska and Grabowski, 2017). The more ‘progressive’ media, including OKO.press, employ practices geared towards nuancing menacing representations, such as ‘fact-checking, providing a platform for progressive voices, and running stories about positive interactions with [Muslim] refugees living in Poland’ (Piela, 2020: 289). Yet, while liberal media attempt to counterbalance the negative image of non-European migrants with warmer representations of labour migrants from Ukraine, the analysis of pro-government and anti-government media shows that securitisation of migration is present across the board (Troszyński and El-Ghamari, 2022). However, early evidence suggests that Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to the prevalence of neutral, if not positive, portrayal of fleeing Ukrainians in the Polish media (Zawadzka-Paluektau, 2023).
This article departs from the existing literature on media and migration in two important ways. Firstly, it aims to focus specifically on media discourses on the border, rather than on migrants and migration, in the hope of showing contingency and diversity to overcome a tendency to homogenise. Secondly, I seek to analyse media discourses on the border in relation not to the state's approaches to the border alone but in the context of its politics of belonging, that is, the sum total of political projects of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006: 197).
To this end, I propose to approach media as ‘borderscapers’ whose borderscaping discourses imbue borders with political and social meaning. I take my cue from the border studies concept of ‘borderscape’, which complicates the border spatially and conceptually by viewing it as a space that is not static but fluid and shifting; established and at the same time continuously traversed by a number of bodies, discourses, practices, and relationships that highlight endless definitions and shifts in definition between inside and outside, citizens and foreigners across state, regional, racial, and other symbolic boundaries. (Brambilla, 2015: 19)
What is distinct about borderscapes, though, is that they highlight the differential construction of borders by examining local configurations of bordering practices that dis/connect different communities and shape their mutual perceptions (Laine et al., 2020). In addition, borderscapes are ‘charged fields of dynamic inter-action… between relationally positioned actors’ (Tsoni, 2016: 44) that emphasise the importance of human relations and interactions in the construction of borders. Consequently, borderscapes posit that ‘who’ is represented as interacting with the border, ‘how’ and ‘why’ are empirical questions.
Materials and method
Because borderscapes are discursively constructed (Brambilla, 2015), this article employs FDA. Foucault is ‘one of our most eminent and original theorists of bordering’ (Walters, 2011: 157), whose methods are well-suited to critical analyses of news as they reveal that knowledge conveyed by media is enmeshed in power relations (Andrejevic, 2008). Crucially, I do not view FDA as a set of prescribed procedures to be followed, but as a ‘tool-box’ (Olsson, 2010: 65). From this toolkit, I borrow a concept of discourse as reflective of social reality and productive thereof insofar as it creates objects it speaks of and subjects it seeks to govern (Foucault, 1982). Accordingly, I approach borderscaping as a discourse generative of borderscapes that simultaneously constructs state borders through mediating interactions and constitutes the actors that interact with those borders. Importantly, individual discourses are inextricably linked to other surrounding discourses, and the ‘truth claims’ they propose become intelligible – or not – both within each discourse and in relation to those larger formations (Olsson, 2010).
Thus, the analysis was performed on two planes: the intra- and interdiscursive. I started by investigating each borderscaping discourse separately and focusing on the representations of how various actors interacted with borders. In this step, I closely read and manually coded the material for proper nouns referring to different actors, such as migrants, the Polish government/state/public/civil society, the EU, its institutions and member states (most notably, Germany) and ‘hostile countries’: Belarus and Russia. Next, I related representations analysed in the first step to the state politics of belonging, specifically to the PiS government's ‘truth-claims’ about the crises on which its politics of belonging rested.
To assemble the corpus, I used a two-step procedure. I first selected two digital-born media outlets with opposing relationships to the PiS government: wPolityce.pl and OKO.press. Established in 2010, wPolityce.pl is the most influential right-wing online news portal in Poland (IMM, 2023). Intensely partisan, it is independent from but closely aligned with the PiS government. Albeit curated by professional journalists, wPolityce.pl is peppered with ideologically extreme and misleading ‘junk news’ (Marchal et al., 2019). The prevalence of such content stems from an ‘identity-journalistic’ ethos that subordinates news to identities (Klimkiewicz, 2021; Polynczuk-Alenius and Hartikainen, 2024).
OKO.press is an investigative journalism portal, established in 2016 to fact-check public debate and act as a watchdog of the state apparatus; functions that politicised media in Poland rarely perform (Głowacki and Kuś, 2019). It vows to promote democratic values and human rights, for which it received the 2020 Index on Censorship journalism award (Kelly, 2020). Accordingly, OKO.press declares non-partisanship and professes to approach every government critically.
Secondly, I collected all articles published by each outlet in April 2022 under the tag ‘refugees’ 3 . This tag – unlike, for example, ‘migration’, which did not cover war refugees from Ukraine – allowed me to simultaneously capture the coverage of both prongs of the border emergency during the moment of early ‘normalisation’. While the zone surrounding the Polish–Belarusian border remained closed, Russia's war on Ukraine was no longer the single most important but still a very prominent topic in Polish media. The final corpus included 193 articles: 146 from wPolityce.pl and 47 from OKO.press. Although the sheer number of items seems incomparable between the two outlets, the articles published by OKO.press were significantly more substantive, resulting in a PDF binder of 727 pages vis-à-vis 615 pages for wPolityce.pl.
Analysis of borderscaping discourses
The analysed borderscaping discourses produce four borderscapes: (1) a Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of invisibility’ (wPolityce.pl), (2) a Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of rejection’ (OKO.press), (3) a Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape without borders’ (wPolityce.pl), and (4) a Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape of assimilation’ (OKO.press). Significantly, borderscapes differ less from border to border than they do between the outlets, thus signalling the outlets’ referential relation to the state politics of belonging. Accordingly, wPolityce.pl is in sync with the state politics of belonging, attested to by its interpretation of both the ‘hybrid operation’ and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as instances of Russian imperialism. OKO.press, meanwhile, asserts that how each crisis is handled is symptomatic of the racist differentiation that underpins the state politics of belonging.
A borderscape of invisibility
WPolityce.pl constructs the Polish–Belarusian border as a borderscape of invisibility, in that its scarce reporting complies with the PiS government's handling of the situation as a security threat best shielded from public eye (Fajfer, 2021; see Stratoudaki, 2022). Indeed, the slim coverage serves to link the border emergency to the ‘hybrid operation’, executed by the Belarusian dictator but masterminded by Russia with a view to destabilising the EU (13 April 2022, 26 April 2022). At the core of the ‘hybrid operation’ is the artificially generated migration crisis at the Polish–Belarusian border (13 April 2022; see Filipec, 2022), which Polish president describes as ‘a remarkable action against Poland, sudden, unexpected…a form of some exercise on the Russian-Belarusian part’ (1 April 2022).
Irregularised migrants’ direct interactions with the border are thus read as a sign of indirect encounters with hostile forces (see Avraamidou and Ioannou, 2023). This interpretation configures asylum seekers as agency-less ‘tools’, who need to be deterred to confirm the ‘resilience of the eastern flank of NATO and…the European Union’ (11 April 2022). Given the asserted artificiality of the crisis, wPolityce.pl considers the encounters of non-European irregularised migrants with the Polish frontier strictly illegal. This sets them apart from ‘real refugees’: ‘let us reiterate: people from the Belarusian border ARE NOT REFUGEES and helping them only provokes Lukashenko to continue bringing them in’ (4 April 2022). Emphasising the illegitimacy of certain migrants by ascribing to them the status of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers and contrasting them with ‘real’ refugees is common in anti-immigration discourses (Stratoudaki, 2022). WPolityce.pl, however, trivialises not only the irregularised migrants’ predicament in the country of origin but also their experience at the Polish–Belarusian border by dubbing them ‘Middle Eastern tourists’ (22 April 2022), or ‘Lukashenko's tourists’ (4 April 2022), and contradicting activists’ and other media's accounts on the dire situation for people stranded at the border (e.g., 13 April 2022, 20 April 2022).
In addition to the artificial migration crisis, the ‘hybrid operation’ also involves information warfare, corroborated by Meta's reports that some Facebook accounts linked to the Belarusian KGB propagated ‘posts accusing Poland of mistreating migrants from the Middle East and calling for protests against the Polish government’ (8 April 2022). Extending this limited claim, wPolityce.pl implicitly misattributes all critique of state's actions to foreign agents (see Stratoudaki, 2022): …in this situation [the war in Ukraine] it is not difficult to put two and two together: it's not a coincidence that precisely now the topic of alleged refugees at the Polish-Belarusian border is again fired up. Alas, some media, politicians, and activists play into Lukashenko's hands. (4 April 2022)
In sum, wPolityce.pl's ‘borderscape of invisibility’ reflects the PiS government's ‘truth claim’ about the Polish–Belarusian border as a site of Russia-backed ‘hybrid operation’. This interpretation justifies the protection of borders by any means necessary, ranging from restricting public access to harmful actions geared towards deterring migrants (see Avraamidou and Ioannou, 2023). In contradistinction to typical representations (see Stratoudaki, 2022), however, irregularised migrants themselves are not portrayed as threatening. Rather, it is by configuring them as foot soldiers of Russian imperialism, whose arrival at the border signals indirect interactions with hostile forces, that wPolityce.pl expels non-European migrants from the human community characterised by agency, individual motivation and unique lived experiences.
A borderscape of rejection
OKO.press lifts the veil on the humanitarian crisis at the Polish–Belarusian border by building around it a borderscape of rejection, whereby undesirable interactions certain actors have with the border cause them to be denied belonging. In OKO.press, the Polish state is not threatened by the non-European migrants; rather, it is endangering them. Furthermore, because the borderscape of rejection includes interactions other than those between migrants and the state apparatus, control intersects therein with care and securitisation with humanitarianism (see Chouliaraki and Georgiou, 2019).
Pivotal for the borderscape of rejection is the recognition that racist differentiation, rather than ‘Russian imperialism’, is at the root of the state politics of belonging. This foundation is laid bare by the incommensurability of responses to the non-European irregularised migrants with those to the war refugees from Ukraine (e.g., 3 April 2022, 14 April 2022). The editor-in-chief writes that the state ‘sees people’ in ‘hundreds of thousands of refugees from Ukraine but denies humanity to the thousands of refugees and migrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan’ and ‘[o]pens one border, [while] building a wall on the other, pushing people into suffering, into death’ (17 April 2022). Although not all quoted sources advocate that the treatment of people at the Polish–Belarusian border be identical to that of the refugees from Ukraine (19 April 2022), they tend to emphasise similarities between the two groups (see especially 16 April 2022).
In this context, non-European migrants are constructed as victimised because of and via their interactions with the border. If pushed back, they have nature weaponised against them: ‘The group was trapped in the area that for the refugees and migrants pushed over from Belarus is a deadly trap’ (14 April 2022). If they manage to avoid pushbacks, migrants are thrown into a limbo of ‘legal liminality’ (Tsoni, 2016), while vegetating in detention centres, often plagued by horrendous living conditions (11 April 2022). Those who return to their country of origin are haunted by trauma, which is evident in an investigative article about the fate of a would-be refugee family who returned to Iraqi Kurdistan (18 April 2022). The piece employs textual descriptions of drawings by a seven-year-old girl as prompts to recount her family's interactions with the Polish–Belarusian border: the horrors they suffered (‘It is dark and scary [in the picture]. Trees are like brown ghosts; they swing their branches and block the path.’) and the dehumanisation they endured (‘…after our earlier experiences in the forest I started to doubt [we were humans].’).
In addition, the borderscape of rejection is constituted through the interactions that civil society organisations, activists and local inhabitants have with the border, irregularised migrants and Polish officials. Due to the difficulties in accessing people stranded at the border and the concerns for their safety (9 April 2022), those who help the asylum seekers relate much of what is happening in the closed off zone. Their undesirable interactions with the border violate the PiS government's wish to keep the zone sealed off and, as OKO.press regularly reports, expose them to undue repressions, dubbed the ‘criminalisation of help and solidarity’ (e.g., 3 April 2022, 18 April 2022) (see Tsoni, 2016). An activist caught in the border zone, for example, was detained for ‘human trafficking’, threatened with three months of arrest and had her parents’ flat searched (9 April 2022). Besides being harassed by the authorities, the inhabitants of the border zone who engage in helping irregularised migrants are stigmatised by their local communities: ‘…we do exactly the same that people do at the Polish–Ukrainian border, except for this we face…ostracism or open antipathy on the part of our neighbours’ (14 April 2022). In this way, rejection concerns not only asylum seekers but also those who try to help them.
In sum, OKO.press constructs the Polish–Belarusian border as the ‘borderscape of rejection’ by representing interactions and relations that expose the racist underpinnings and negative repercussions of the state's politics of belonging, while rebuffing the state's ‘truth claims’ about ‘Russian imperialism’. While non-European irregularised migrants are ejected from the category of refugees, dehumanised and subjected to trauma and uncertainty, those who help them are treated as criminals and pushed to the margins of their local communities. In its reporting, OKO.press aims to redraw those lines of (non-)belonging charted by state power. On one hand, it tries to bring the non-European asylum seekers into the fold of ‘deserving’ refugees by revealing their victimisation at the border. On the other, it shifts the legal–ethical frontier by portraying civil society and local activists as righteously opposing the state's illegal and immoral politics of belonging that turns on racist differentiation (Pszczółkowska, 2022).
A borderscape without borders
WPolityce.pl constructs around the Polish–Ukrainian border a borderscape without borders by plugging Ukraine's plight into the notion of Russian imperialism. It does so by configuring the ‘hybrid operation’ as ‘a prelude to the war [on Ukraine]’ and the Polish–Belarusian border as a testing ground for Russia's imperial designs (11 April 2022). Fleeing Ukrainians are thus considered victims of the same force that has harassed Poland throughout the centuries, and ‘borderlessness’ is, therefore, never challenged (17 April 2022).
Although Ukrainian refugees are the main actors interacting with the border, wPolityce.pl has little to say about them, other than that they can get on with their lives on terms similar to Polish citizens. They enjoy equal access to the job market and social provisions (16 April 2022), the school system (2 April 2022) and healthcare (21 April 2022). On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this wholesale inclusion is contingent on the refugees’ usefulness to Poland's security and economic needs (‘As we help refugees and Ukraine and they fight there for our safety, those who have come to our country work for the Polish economy’, 25 April 2022) and the temporariness of their stay (‘[Minister of Education] highlighted that Poland's aim is to provide care to the Ukrainian children for the period when they – somewhat forcibly – remain in Poland’, 7 April 2022).
Symptomatically, it is typically Poles, and usually the high-ranking figures linked to PiS, who talk about this seeming inclusion. The rare Ukrainian voices are cited exclusively to endorse these ‘truth claims’ with their appreciation and gratitude. This is true for both prominent figures – such as the First Lady Olena Zelenska (29 April 2022) – and the ‘ordinary refugees’, such as 78-year-old ‘Mrs Maria’ (24 April 2022). WPolityce.pl, therefore, outlines a new blueprint for the Polish–Ukrainian relationship, built around Polish help and Ukrainian gratitude (see Szeptycki, 2021).
Consequently, wPolityce.pl positions Poles as the main group interacting with the Polish–Ukrainian border, whose porousness enables help to flow unobstructed from Poland to Ukraine (19 April 2022). The blurring of the physical border magnifies Poland's agency, which reaches its climax in the statement from the Polish First Lady during a meeting with refugees, in which she assures them that ‘Poland does everything to end the military conflict in Ukraine’ (7 April 2022). This dramatic reversal portrays Poland as having real agency, while Ukrainians merely endure the war waged against them.
A similarly over-the-top tone permeates wPolityce.pl's reporting on social mobilisation (28 April 2022). To this end, it cites statistics that favourably compare Poland to other countries: ‘Researchers from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy prepared a very interesting comparison…[w]hich shows that the US is the leader of help for [Ukraine], Poland is right behind’ (22 April 2022). It also commends specific Polish actors who interact with the Polish–Ukrainian border, praising local governments for their efforts to support refugees (12 April 2022), highlighting the role of the Catholic Church (13 April 2022) and extolling the PiS government (29 April 2022).
Crucially, wPolityce.pl candidly identifies the help extended to Ukrainian refugees as a source of immense ‘soft power’. Awe at Polish efforts is reported to be a global phenomenon, including accolades from the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ (3 April 2022), the US ambassador (15 April 2022), the German President (12 April 2022), Ivanka Trump (7 April 2022) and Pope Francis (20 April 2022). A priest interviewed by wPolityce.pl clearly articulates this nexus of help, reputation and power: …Poles passed the exam in works of mercy…In my opinion, God has given us a difficult opportunity, but we have used it in an exemplary manner. We have broken with the narrative, maintained for years, about Poles as a mean nation that does not want to help anyone. (17 April 2022) …the women and children who fled Ukraine…want to return to their Fatherland to build its strength and sovereignty, but they need means to do so! High time we received the money we deserve from the European Union that will help us make their dreams come true. (11 April 2022; italics added)
Overall, wPolityce.pl constructs the Polish–Ukrainian borderscape without borders by representing interactions that blur some lines of belonging to sharpen others, aligning with the government's ‘truth claims’. Configured as victims of Russian imperialism whose interactions with the Polish state border are smooth, legal and safe, fleeing Ukrainians are portrayed as belonging in Poland on terms equal to Polish citizens, even if temporarily and conditionally. By contrasting the abundant interactions of the Polish state and society with the Ukrainian border with the lack thereof on the part of EU institutions with whom the PiS government is conflicted, wPolityce.pl constructs a moral border between the two.
A borderscape of assimilation
OKO.press counters the PiS government's ‘truth claims’ about the openness of the Polish–Ukrainian border by positioning it in the context of the state's racist politics of belonging and weaving it into a borderscape of assimilation, whereby extreme borderlessness is identical to assimilation and configured as detrimental to all migrants. For Ukrainian refugees, the extension of borderlessness into their everyday reality in Poland means that their unique needs go unheeded (e.g., 9 April 2022). Experts appearing in OKO.press bring up linguistic challenges that fleeing Ukrainians face in accessing public services to which they are nominally entitled, such as healthcare (5 April 2022). Likewise, the incorporation of Ukrainian pupils, who usually do not speak the local language, into the Polish school system without providing adequate support, is considered detrimental to their learning and well-being and a means of propagating assimilation if not accompanied by the revision of curricula (17 April 2022). Thus, the alleged seamlessness of interactions at the border is overcast by bordering practices that persist inside the country's borders.
Yet, as OKO.press reports, even the borderlessness at the border is deceptive; rather, racism orders the interactions there, in that not all people fleeing Ukraine receive equal treatment. Those not passing as Ukrainians are singled out and have their crossing severely delayed, while waiting outside in the cold without water or food. Thus, OKO.press urges that for some, the ‘open’ border becomes a site of trauma and even death: ‘Non-white refugees froze to death in the queue. Oskar, a Nigerian computer engineering student from Dnipro, four days in the line, [said]: “We saw bodies of Africans laying around…It was frightening”’ (15 April 2022).
While these excesses are reported to have occurred on the Ukrainian side, racist differentiation extends into Poland. As evidence, OKO.press notes that a mixed-race Ukrainian woman was refused healthcare because she ‘did not look Ukrainian’ (7 April 2022). It also outlines the hardships faced by the Roma refugees who, despite being Ukrainian citizens, experience forceful removals from their accommodations or are unable to find housing altogether (14 April 2022). OKO.press connects the situation of the Roma refugees to the predicament of irregularised migrants stranded at the Polish–Belarusian border in order to make a point about the systemic and institutional nature of racism: ‘Much points to the fact that skin colour and origins impinge on who will be helped and who will be able to feel safe in Poland’ (1 April 2022) (see Parmar, 2020).
According to OKO.press, the main groups interacting with the Polish–Ukrainian border on the Polish side are civil society organisations and local government actors who act as lynchpins in coordinating help for Ukrainian refugees (see Pszczółkowska, 2022). These grassroots efforts are sharply contrasted with the sluggishness of the PiS government, whose virtual abdication of responsibility has been accompanied by insinuations that the state's inaction is the EU's fault (14 April 2022). The government's idleness concerns not only the lack of infrastructure for receiving and housing refugees but also the absence of a proper migration policy, which inhibits the inevitable development of a multi-ethnic society (2 April 2022, 4 April 2022, 5 April 2022, 29 April 2022).
By reporting on the lived experiences of people fleeing Ukraine in all their diversity, OKO.press constructs around the selectively open Polish–Ukrainian border a ‘borderscape of assimilation’ in two senses. Firstly, such a border regime has the effect of superficially embracing Ukrainians, perceived as perfectly assimilable due to the linguistic and cultural proximity, while erasing their unique needs. Secondly, those perceived as assimilable are openly favoured at the border and beyond, sharpening the division between Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians, whose claim to safety is refused. Equally perniciously, the ‘borderscape of assimilation’ draws a line between ethnic Ukrainians and Ukrainians from ethnic and racial minorities, whose belonging both in Poland and to the Ukrainian nation is questioned. Consequently, OKO.press exposes racism that lies at the centre of the ‘truth claims’ about borderlessness.
Conclusions
This article analysed mediated ‘borderscaping’ discourses on a two-pronged border emergency in Poland by focusing on ‘borderscapes’ composed of the representations of distinct constellations of interactions that constituted each border. It uncovered four borderscapes: (1) the Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of invisibility’, which goes virtually unreported on the grounds of illegality of the irregularised migrants’ interactions with the border that are configured as premeditated by hostile forces (wPolityce.pl); (2) the Polish–Belarusian ‘borderscape of rejection’ that foregrounds the traumas and exclusions inflicted on irregularised migrants and those who help them by the victimising interactions they have with the border (OKO.press); (3) the Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape without borders’ that focuses on the Polish help extended by the state and society as the key set of interactions at the border (wPolityce.pl); and (4) the Polish–Ukrainian ‘borderscape of assimilation’ that fleshes out how racist differentiation shapes interactions at and with the border (OKO.press). Simultaneously, I investigated the referential relationship of these discourses to the state politics of belonging and the truth claims on which it rests: while wPolityce.pl justifies the state politics of belonging by referring to Russian imperialism that plays out in both the ‘hybrid operation’ and the war on Ukraine, OKO.press is invested in exposing the thinly veiled racism of the state politics of belonging.
Thus, the borderscaping discourse of wPolityce.pl aligns with both its allegiance to the PiS government and the media's well-documented tendency to rally behind political power in case of crisis or emergency (Stanley, 2015). OKO.press, in turn, appears to approximate what Anderson (2021) calls the ‘journalism of fear’. Drawing on Shklar's recognition of the state's propensity to cruelty whose burden falls unproportionally on the weak, Anderson (2021: 1923) argues that journalism ‘should look to support the weak in their struggles against the strong as much as possible, all for the purpose of reducing political cruelty’. Indeed, OKO.press’ borderscaping discourse decentres the border as an arena of geopolitical struggles. Instead, it reveals how such power games played out at the borders convert the weak into pawns or bargaining chips and interrogates the harms such an objectification inflicts on them. In so doing, it attempts to transcend the framework of securitisation that characterises recent discourses on migration and begins to refocus on human rights (see Troszyński and El-Ghamari, 2022).
As its key contribution, this article develops the notion of media as ‘borderscapers’ that both foregrounds the border in its own right and contextualises it in relation to the state politics of belonging. By leaning on the concept of ‘borderscape’, borrowed from border studies, I approach the border as a product of multiple and manifold human relations and interactions. Thus, I offer a theoretical perspective attentive to actors other than migrants and state apparatuses, such as geopolitical adversaries (Belarus and Russia) and allies (the EU, its institutions and member states).
Empirically, the novelty of this article lies in its comparative aspect that showcases the malleability of borders. By analysing how two different media outlets construct two different borders of one state at the same time, it demonstrates the coexistence of differing approaches to borders and migration and their contingent nature. In addition, it is one of the first studies of representations of Ukrainian refugees vis-à-vis those of non-European migrants whose differential treatment has been widely noted but not yet adequately investigated.
That said, this analysis was based on coverage from April 2022 and the progressive seeping of Russian disinformation into the Polish social media has negatively impacted representations of Ukrainian refugees since (Głuchowski and Bielecka, 2023). In addition, the PiS government's stance towards Ukraine changed in the run-up to the 2023 election causing Poland to withdraw some help. Finally, following the election, PiS lost the parliamentary majority and a new government was formed in late 2023. Although the hard-line approach to the Polish-Belarusian border continues, thereby perpetuating the humanitarian crisis, the new government's rhetoric has softened. A follow-up study is needed to trace how those political shifts have affected media's borderscaping discourses.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847639 and from the Ministry of Education and Science. The work was also supported by the Koneen Säätiö.
