By Nasar Meer and Emma Hill
In their recent article, Nasar Meer and Emma Hill examine how narratives of “crisis” have become embedded within the everyday governance of asylum in the United Kingdom. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square into conversation with framing and political communication scholarship, the article argues that crisis discourse is not simply rhetorical. Rather, it has become administratively productive, shaping procurement systems, evidentiary practices, and the lived experience of asylum accommodation itself.
From crisis discourse to crisis ordinariness
The article begins from a core insight in policy studies: before governments can act on a policy “problem”, they must first frame it as such. In the field of asylum governance, this increasingly occurs through narratives of emergency, invasion, and loss of control. While concepts such as the Overton window help explain shifts in political possibility, Meer and Hill argue that they can understate the communicative power through which migration is continually reproduced as crisis.
To address this, the article turns to van Dijk’s ideological square, which foregrounds how discourse systematically emphasises “our” virtues and “their” failings, while minimising countervailing evidence. The authors extend this beyond discourse analysis to show how evaluative asymmetries become embedded within the epistemic and administrative architecture of governance. The result is what they term “crisis ordinariness”: a condition in which emergency becomes the routine operating logic of asylum governance.
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