Migrant Crisis

The paper analyses communication about the European migrant crisis in East-Central Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic, as it was happening on the Facebook platform. In discussions amongst Czechs, the collective Orientalist unconscious shapes what imaginative geographies are communicated, and how. The paper argues for a coupling of the critique of Orientalist imaginative geographies and Deleuzean critique of the pointillistic chronological time. Both, imaginative geographies and the chronological time, acknowledge difference only as the difference from the Same. In the analysed communication, imaginative geographies draw on several notions of temporality that depend on the chronological time. These are the single timeline of progress, tunnels of time, movement towards apocalypse, and repetition of the past. They transform African and Middle-Eastern imaginative geographies and understandings of people migrating from these spaces. They also compose an imaginative geography of Western Europe which collapses under the surge of migrants. It provokes an irreconcilableness between the anti-immigration and pro-migration attitudes of discussants as it leads to emplacing the other attitudinal side in the past time. Therefore, the paper calls for an ethics of the event and the need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of diverse temporalities and accidentality of a present event.

This article analyzes, from the perspective of Samuel Huntington’s hypothesis about a “clash of civilizations,” the nature of the mass sexual assaults on women committed by migrants coming from non-European countries on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Germany. It is argued that the fundamental cultural factor triggering this criminal behavior was the clash of a patriarchal culture of honor and Islamic ethical code with liberal Western urban culture. But the cultural factor was not isolated. The “non-cultural” factors, i.e. social, biological, psychological, demographic, and economic factors, played important role.

The article reprinted in A Quarter Century of the "Clash of Civilizations" (Published May 11, 2021 by Routledge), Edited by Jeffrey Haynes, ISBN 9780367751524
https://www.routledge.com/A-Quarter-Century-of-the-Clash-of-Civilizations/Haynes/p/book/9780367751524

This chapter examines how ironic utterances in forums are used for the purpose of collective positioning of the commenting readers in opposition to other groups. Approaching irony as an act of echoic interpretation, the analysis focuses on how readers echo both the representations made by the media texts and the beliefs and ideologies presumed to be held by other social actors. It is argued that through irony, readers express their oppositional attitudes, disaffiliating themselves from the ironized social actors and their real or assumed representations. Simultaneously, ironists enforce their own opinions and standpoints, which are not just personal but – as argued in the paper – representative of a larger group to which the commenter belongs. By tracing how irony is used in reader comments to delegitimize dissonant views and emphasize contrastive self-positioning, this paper seeks to extend the application of an interactional pragmatic approach to irony by adding a critical discourse analytical dimension to it.

The aim of this paper is to analyse Mohsin Hamid's 2017 Exit West as a literary response to the 2015 migrant crisis. Hamid's fourth novel will be shown as, on the one hand, a formal departure from his previous works, but on the other, a continuation of the most important thematic threads in the author's output. The paper demonstrates how Hamid takes on the risky chal lenge of capturing the migrant experience by offering a nuanced response to the refugee crisis, which opens up the novel to interpretations from the perspectives of postcolonial studies, trauma theory, and socioliterature. Fur thermore, Hamid's use of the technique of magical realism will be examined as a metaphor and an ellipsis; however, it will be argued that the novel's politically subversive potential lies elsewhere: in the formally realist vision of an optimistic resolution to the migrant crisis. This ending, for many read ers unrealistic and fantastical, if not "magical," offers a "radical political en gagement with the future," as it provides the author's unflagging expression of support for what he calls "impurity," as well as his appeal for strategic hope and optimism in the face of the currently dominant political discourse of fear and division. http://pjes.edu.pl/issues/6-1-2020/

Libya is still second to Syria, the most destabilized Arab country with a myriad of conflicting militias, which are expanding their structure of terrorist organizations and an expanded human smuggling. Trafficking in human beings is extremely important from the point of view of the migration crisis, which permanently changed not only the face of European countries, as shown by statistics from 2014, 2015 and 2017 but the sense of security of Europeans.

European Union is experiencing its greatest dilemma since setting out on its project. With human rights, democracy and freedom as its political and constitutional identity, EU has been forced to reconsider its strategies in order to defend itself and protect its citizens. Politicians continue to alter the local, regional and communitarian legal system, placing legal barriers – and much more – before non-EU immigrants. This puts the community’s ethos (θɒsː θoʊs) in jeopardy and the fear of the other is changing irreversibly the acquis communautaire, the legal corpus that has taken years to create. The panic and weakness of our political leaders has not reassured the people, nor there has been any evidence of reason or dignity in the search for solutions. The extreme reaction has weakened us all and has also undermined European Union’s political aspirations to be a major global player. The difficulty of assimilating a large number of migrants with strong cultural identities of their own, who share a different religion from the majority of the native population, also presents a challenge to unity. They are accustomed to an anthropological political dialectic of dominated/dominant that is different from the European Union reality. Marginalisation and social exclusion will only increase as a result of the lack of assimilation policies as will xenophobia. Radical political changes will follow these social facts.