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.
Administrative burden and asylum accommodation
Empirically, the article traces these dynamics through the governance of asylum accommodation, including the controversy surrounding “asylum hotels”. Drawing on interviews with residents, advocacy organisations, and local stakeholders, the article shows how bureaucratic delay, fragmented accountability, and privatised accommodation contracts are frequently reframed as evidence of asylum “burden” rather than governance failure.
The interview material is especially powerful in illustrating how administrative burden is lived in practice through prolonged uncertainty, constrained mobility, institutional opacity, and continual displacement of responsibility across contractors and state agencies. In this way, the article demonstrates how deterrence operates not only through legislation, but also through routine administrative friction.
Reframing the governance of evidence
The article concludes by arguing that asylum governance increasingly privileges symbolic toughness over empirical calibration, narrowing the range of politically legitimate remedies.
Conceptually, the article contributes to interpretive policy studies by showing how discourse, administrative design, and evidentiary practice interact across multiple institutional sites. More broadly, it offers a framework for understanding how “crisis” can function as a durable mode of governance rather than a temporary political condition.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Meer, N., & Hill, E. (2026). How crisis discourse shapes UK asylum governance: from framing to administrative practice. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2026) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2026D000000097
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested in reading:
Münch, S. (2026). The role of causal mechanisms in policy diffusion: assisted voluntary return policies in Germany. Policy & Politics, 54(3), 404-426 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2026D000000096
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