Who is a refugee? The motive of double standard in French- and Dutch-speaking media during the war in Ukraine

Abstract

The invasion of Ukraine triggered an unprecedented reaction of solidarity from European governments. This article aims at studying the discursive moment of the war in Ukraine, with a focus on the debate that compared the reception of Ukrainians in the present day and of other refugees in 2015. The goal is twofold: first, to objectify the initial intuition that Ukrainians were unanimously considered as deserving refugees; second, to examine the arguments that underlaid this framing. To achieve this goal, a large corpus of media discourse covering three European neighbouring countries (Belgium, France and the Netherlands) was collected and analysed through Corpus Linguistics.