Why Media Reportage Matters in War
Today, amid the catastrophic suffering in Palestine, I’d like to focus my lens on Palestine’s refugees, on the media reportage that tells their stories, and on the embodied reactions we have to them.
______________________________________________________
We are in the midst of a global humanitarian refugee crisis. As of February 2022, over 100 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes, and that number continues to rise alarmingly.
The term refugee has long evoked a primal response: fleeting images on the news of yet another disaster, the impulse to turn away or send a quick donation before we forget, fears about having enough resources in “our own” country, a visceral sense of aversion.
All this occurs amid growing xenophobia in the U.S., not to mention the U.K. and Europe. In 2020, Americans witnessed to child refugees placed in cages, separated from their families, denied medical treatment, abused, and deported to countries with which they had no prior affiliation.
So let’s define the term “refugee” and add a bit of social context.
A refugee is someone compelled to flee (or expelled by force from) their home country because of war, persecution, and violence, and who has experienced persecution because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or political opinion. Refugees cannot return to their country of origin without risking freedom, or even their lives.
Yet we need to acknowledge that most of the world’s ethnic, religious, national, and political conflicts around borders today and the refugees these conflicts generate arise directly from the colonial practices of Europe (think Spain, France, Italy, Portugal), the U.K., the U.S., and Canada, among others. Imperial governments created (or redrew) artificial borders across ethnic, religious, and political lines to forcibly relocate people, keep them in or out of those borders, separate kin, and prevent revolution. Many of these borders are enforced, and conditions accorded refugees diminished, in order for dominant social groups to feel a sense of “safety.”
This is to say nothing of the fact that colonial (or developing, though the term can be problematic as it overlooks plundering countries and plundered ones) countries have contributed to a full 79% of carbon emissions that have perpetrated climate crisis and climate refugees.
These same colonial forces then apply a paternalistic, condescending, often racist approach to “dealing” with the safety, welfare, rights, and self-determination of the very refugees they themselves created.
Sana Mustafa is a feminist human rights defender and CEO of Asylum Access, a family of organizations advocating for a more equitable refugee response system. Sana was forced to flee Syria in 2013. She points out that conversations about refugees and migration have been dominated by Western “experts” who have never experienced forced displacement and who live far from the conflicts in which they intervene to “help.” These efforts do not center displaced people.
Sana states,
“As the first and only female CEO of an international refugee rights organization with lived experience of forced displacement, I am painfully aware that colonialism and white supremacy are central to the formation and functioning of the global refugee protection system.”
The Growing Global Refugee Crisis
Over one-third of the world’s refugees are from Africa. There are 2.4 million internally displaced refugees in South Sudan; of this number, fully 65 percent are children.
Following more than ten years of conflict, Syria has experienced the largest refugee crisis in the world. Over 14 million people have fled the country, and 6.8 million are still internally displaced.
After four decades of military conflict, 8.2 million Afghan refugees have fled to neighboring countries, and 3.2 million remain internally displaced.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has caused 6.2 million people to flee to other countries, and has displaced 5.1 million people inside the country.
Insecurity, violence, and climate disasters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have displaced 5 million people since 2017.
Many Western and colonial forces such as the U.K., the U.S., and Europe (along with Eastern powers such as Russia and China) have played key roles in the military conflicts in those areas, many of which are rich with natural resources like oil (Palestine) or key minerals like cobalt (the DRC and other parts of the Sahel in Africa).
Colonial Influence and “The Palestine Question”
In 1950, the United Nations general assembly formed to address the issue of people fleeing countries in the aftermath of World War II. The U.N. then consisted of representatives from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. In 1947, seven members of the committee voted in favor of the Plan of Partition, which proposed an independent Arab State, and independent Jewish State, and the City of Jerusalem.
The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the Geneva Convention of 1951, is a multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is, and establishes the rights of individuals granted asylum and the responsibilities of asylum-granting nations.
A note: The 1951 Convention was originally limited in scope to humans fleeing events occurring before January of 1951 and to people fleeing events within Europe. (Again, colonialism and racism.)
The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May of 1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region.
Until 1948, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement’s desire and drive to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
In the Nakba of 1948, Israel violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians out of their assigned territory. (The Nakba, a term which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.)
These expulsions were so extreme that Yizhak Rabin wrote about them in his autobiography; when the Israeli government censored those parts, he recounted them to writer David Shipler, who wrote about this time in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Arab and Jew.”
You can hear David’s brief accounting of this in this episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily. And for a more in-depth accounting, check out this episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. (Ezra is bravely hosting difficult conversations that also center Palestinian voices on his podcast, and I highly recommend these.)
Despite the injustice of the Nakba, the 1951 Convention notably omitted Palestinian refugees. The basis for leaving Palestinians out was that, ostensibly, Palestinian refugees were “at present receiving protection and assistance from the U.N.”
Two key historical points made by the United Nations are often left out of conversations about the Arab-Israeli War.
The first: In November 1947, the UN General Assembly a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a U.N. administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee.
In other words, the Palestinians did not initiate the war of 1948, as people sometimes assert.
The second: The Arab Nations initiated war against Israel in 1948. At the time, the Arab League consisted of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Palestine was not a member; it would not join the Arab League until 1976, nearly 30 years after the Nakba.
As early as December 1948, the UN General Assembly called for refugee return, property restitution and compensation. However, 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinian rights continue to be denied. According to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, more than 5 million Palestine refugees are scattered throughout the Middle East.
Today, Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements, evictions, land confiscation and home demolitions. (See the United Nations statement on the “Israel-Palestine” war (their words) and on the humanitarian crisis of epic proportions unfolding in Palestine.)
I’ll add here that the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union also repartitioned Poland after World War II, giving a chunk of Poland the size of Czechoslovakia to Belarus. This meant that Poles who experienced ethnic cleansing and genocide in World War II (in which 5.7 million Poles died, 2.7 of whom were Polish Jews) could not return to their homeland and were made refugees. My mother was one of them; already a refugee living in Uganda after several years in the Siberian Gulag, she finished high school in Uganda and was forcibly relocated. Given few choices of where to resettle, they went as refugees to England.
How Media Reportage Portrays Refugees
Media reportage matters—think headlines, written words, and visual images.
Media and reportage photographers are increasingly aware that their images have the power to influence viewers’ attitudes. Visual storyteller Matt Reichel, who often creates photographs in areas of conflict, co-founded the Inertia Network, a consortium that aims to shift global perspectives on vulnerable, threatened, and marginalized regions and people worldwide.
Matt was kind enough to speak with me for this piece. He emphasized that the publication, story editor, and story goals form the driving force behind how the media portrays entire groups of people. Sometimes an editor may choose to include only wide-angle shots—say, a landscape or crowd of people—that set a scene and show the reader what the setting looks like from a distance. That can be a problem, he says, if an editor finds these to be the primary newsworthy shots.
“For me these shots are an introduction before being able to zoom in with other photos and get an emotional human perspective,” Matt said. Yet sometimes, editors don’t want to provide that level of context, or a written story doesn’t match that level of personal depth.
“If I showed you a portrait of one North Korean soldier,” he continues, “you probably would just see a person and wonder about his story—how he got to this life. If I showed you a photo of a hundred goose stepping North Korean soldiers, you'd probably think something more along the lines of ‘What a group of brainwashed Communists looking to attack.’ Ironically, I could do the same thing with a North Korean gymnast.”
“In herds,” Matt added, “people become representations of what the general audience fears. Stereotypes trigger something in people's brains that says, ‘This is a problem to me, my country, my people, my way of life.’”
Some non-governmental organizations (NGOs), he says, work with refugee communities to develop guides for photographing refugees. These guides focus on humanizing providing context for photographs and humanizing their subjects.
Here are Matt’s concluding thoughts:
“You learn from your mistakes, or the mistakes you make by trusting too much in a publication to "do the right thing" when it comes to protecting and honoring subjects. So more skills and sensitivity training in how to tell human, emotional topics, especially on marginalized, vulnerable groups of people is something that media photographers should know and constantly learn. A good way of doing this is by really building an honest emotional connection to other people. When the photographer knows their subject, spends time with their subject, invests emotion into them, cares about their life and their likes and needs and fears, they will be a better photographer. It shows in the images. I look at my images and lament the ones I missed, the frames of a story I failed to take. I make a mental note to be more thoughtful for the next piece. I know there are still cracks, but at least fewer of them. Photography is a constant art of improvement and learning; and I love that most about it.”
A Picture Is Worth 1,000 words—but how do those words get inside us?
Until recently, scientists have thought that media photographs of large groups of refugees made viewers indifferent to human suffering.
Yet emerging research suggests a more insidious effect: visual images of large groups can actually lead to dehumanization. And in a surprising new finding, they influence the political choices that viewers make.
In a study published in May of 2021 in Nature, researchers examined visual images across ten studies and 3,951 European citizens (where attitudes have been historically hostile toward refugees). They found that exposure to images of large groups (8 or more people) of refugees evoked greater implicit dehumanization than images of small groups.
After viewing images with many refugees, viewers’ support for pro-refugee policies declined. (This is how we can become desensitized to violence.)
They also displayed a preference for a less trustworthy political leader.
Yet images of refugees don’t just affect our minds. We have an embodied, emotional response to them.
This is part of an emerging field called visceral politics, the study of how our bodies (and through them, our feelings) influence our response to images and shape our political beliefs and choices.
Manos Tsakiris, a co-author in the Nature study and a leading social neuroscientist, directs the Royal Holloway Lab in London. Tsakiris opened the new Centre for the Politics of Feelings in London in 2021 to explore the body’s role in political beliefs, choices, and behaviors.
“There may be adverse social consequences,” Tsakiris told me in an interview, “of exposing people to this kind of imagery.”
Why Visual Humanization (and Dehumanization) Matter
These findings are particularly relevant now.
Research indicates that during times of social and political crisis, the number of media images increases dramatically, strengthening the effect that visual framings have on viewers. This has been the case throughout the last month in the vast bombings and mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza, as well as the 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan of Afghan citizens to Pakistan, Australia, Germany, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, France, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.
And then there’s the accelerating climate crisis, also a byproduct of colonialism, racial capitalism, and the climate injustice they engender.
Scholar David Livingstone Smith is the author of several books, most recently the book On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. Smith believes that the current climate crisis will intensify these effects.
“Climate change will produce a massive increase in authoritarianism,” Smith told me in an email. “People will feel more and more helpless in the face of the forces of nature, and massive numbers of refugees will move across national borders. Authoritarian politicians will exploit these factors, and the stage is set for genocidal violence.”
Smith emphasized the ease with which visual images aid dehumanization, and the importance of stopping it in its tracks.
Putting Humanization Into Practice
Land is body, and body is land.
If you’re open to it, take a moment to rest your palms anywhere on your body, such as your abdomen, heart, or both. Begin to breathe slowly and deeply through your nose. Allow your eyes to relax and draw inward; you need not close your eyes unless you want to. Feel the contact point between your palms and your body. As you continue to breathe in and out, draw your awareness to the contact point where your palms reside. Let your awareness move to this point as well, pooling in the area where your palms rest. Imagine this contact point between your palms and your body as a gateway between your outer awareness and your deep internal awareness. When you are ready, begin to view the images in this article. What comes up for you as you do? What do you feel in your body, and where? As you breathe, stay with the sensations that arise as they shift and change from one moment to the next.
As you breathe and source your body, take thirty seconds with each of the curated images in this article in any order that works for you. What comes up? Where do you feel it? What’s your visceral response to what you feel? If you notice an urge to dissociate, or turn away, try to cultivate curiosity and compassion.
Consider taking this practice with you as you read or watch the news and scroll through social media.
Sources:
Most of the world’s ethnic, religious, national, and political conflicts around borders today originate directly from the colonial: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/lawresearch/2021/12/colonialism-and-international-law-made-refugees-inevitable-britain-cant-ignore-its-responsibilities-now/
This is to say nothing of the fact that colonial countries have contributed to a full 79% of carbon emissions: https://www.cgdev.org/media/who-caused-climate-change-historically
Over one-third of the world’s refugees are from Africa: https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/south-sudan
In 1947, seven members of the committee voted in favor of the Plan of Partition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_and_the_United_Nations
Despite the injustice of the Nakba, the 1951 Convention notably omitted Palestinian:
https://www.unrwa.org/content/1951-convention
In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine: VS. (2023, November 29). About the Nakba. Question of Palestine. https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/
At the time, the Arab League consisted of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Arab_League
Today, Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements: United Nations
Thank you bo. This so powerfully explains something I think we all know deep down as we consume media - dehumanization is such a dangerous form of manipulation (from the outside in) and equally dangerous form protection/aversion (from the inside out) I can’t think of a more important use of embodiment than practicing it to humanize one another. Thank you for always always always choosing humanity. 💚
Thank you! Reading your definition of refugee got me thinking that the reaction to homeless people locally is similar. Aren't they also refugees in a sense? Of the insane housing-cost crisis we are facing? I suppose the answer is the same, looking and learning. With loving kindness <3