A securitização de refugiados nos discursos oficiais franceses e brasileiros em 2019 e 2020: uma análise crítica e decolonial

Abstract

The growing flows of refugees nowadays demand analyzes of the concept, treatment and reception of these individuals in destination's States. These flows also expose the need to study the positions and political roles played by the countries and their reception. After all, there is a difficulty in conferring a dignified treatment for refugees by destination's States in a process that appears to be the securitization of international migration as a result from changes in political contexts both internally and internationally, which range from the rise of extreme right-wing governments with xenophobic tendencies and the resumption of nationalisms, to the occurrence of economic and sanitary crisis. As for this matter, the main objective of this study is to analyze the specific process of refugee's securitization in official political discursive practices and discursive representations of refugees in French and Brazilian speeches between 2019 and 2020, from a critical and decolonial perspective. Considering the plural contexts and the different geopolitical positions of the Global North and Global South that these States fit into, both prove to be quite repulsive to migrants and refugees. Thus, the problem that guides this research is: do French and Brazilian official political discourses in 2019 and 2020 reveal a security bias in the treatment of refugees? If yes, why? To achieve this purpose, in addition to a critical and decolonial review of the refugee concept, a descriptive and qualitative research was carried out based on the operational methodology of discourse analysis of 47 French speeches and 59 Brazilian speeches in the selected period, among official pronouncements, interviews and speeches given by presidents, ministers and other relevant political figures. These speeches were collected on the countries' official websites, and were critically analyzed from a full reading investigating the existence of a security bias. The research findings reveal that there is a securitizing content of refuge, as well as migration in general, in French and Brazilian discourses, there have been indicated six predominant rhetorics in this process, namely: the protection of cultural and national values, the control of external borders, the containment of terrorism, the association of migration with criminalization, the tightening of migratory measures legitimized by the COVID-19 pandemic and the use of migration and refugee theme for specific political and ideological interests. As the main contribution, this dissertation reveals the presence of colonial and security factors in the behavior and discursive positioning of France and Brazil.