Caught between Vulnerability and Competence – UNHCR’s Visual Framing of Refugees, Economic Threat Perceptions and Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers in Germany

Abstract

Humanitarian actors often present refugees as vulnerable to mobilize support. Their visual framing, in particular, moves refugees’ helplessness to the center. Critical scholars, however, argue that this representation can have exclusionary effects. In this article, we outline a research agenda to examine this claim empirically and provide initial results testing it. Based on a survey experiment, we show that vulnerability representations have significant effects on the perception of refugees as more dependent than refugees in capacity representations. These perceptions are linked to the view that refugees are economically burdensome, which, in turn, is linked to negative attitudes towards asylum seekers.