FRONTEX’S HUMANITARIAN DEPORTATION - How do racialised and gendered discourses in Frontex’s Guidebook for Children in Return sustain the contradiction between border violence and humanitarian care?

Sammanfattning

The objective of the research is to investigate how Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, uses its Guidebook for Children in Return to reconcile the violence of deportation and Frontex human rights violations with a humanitarian self-image. Through an intersectional lens, the analysis focuses on how race and gender are represented and how this representation contributes to sustaining the contradiction. The central method is a Critical Discourse Analysis based on Fairclough (1992) with an emphasis on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2021) Social Semiotic Multimodality in the descriptive dimension of the three-step analysis. The analysis shows that through Frontex role in the Guidebook coercion is obscured and creates a non-responsibility discourse. By depicting superficially diverse groups of families and personnel, Frontex suggests that deportation is a neutral administrative process and conceals its discriminatory structure. Ultimately, the Guidebook functions as a legitimisation tool, similar to other publications from Frontex, like the annual Risk Analysis Reports. By using a children’s book genre to generate the image of child-vulnerability the Guidebook serves to naturalise border regimes and a growing mandate of Frontex and maintain the EU’s image as a civilised and moral security actor in contrast to the non-European ‘Other’.