Post-Truth Politics, Migration and Border Security

This book argues that post-truth discourses are deeply influencing political debates on migration and border security, blurring the line between fact-based debates and post-truth storylines. Offering a nuanced analysis of discourse within parliamentary debates on migration across multiple EU countries and the European Parliament, the book challenges conventional assumptions about the drivers of post-truth, highlighting its role in legislative settings rather than solely in informalised public fora like social media. It illuminates the presence and use of post-truth narratives and the pervasiveness of post-factual politics at the centre of democratic policy-making processes, namely parliamentary debates, and highlights how certain post-truth structures become embedded into mainstream political debates and policies. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and professionals in migration policy/studies, political communication, communication studies, and more broadly to public policy, European studies, media studies, international relations and sociology.

Karolina Czerska-Shaw is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Change Research in Europe at the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Maciej St-pka is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Change Research in Europe at the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

1. Introducing Migration, Post-Truth Politics and Political Discourses 2. (Un)Becoming Naïve in European Parliamentary Debates: From Humanitarianism to Lies, Foolishness and Falsehoods 3. Securitisation of Migration and Post-Truth in Polish Parliamentary Debates: The Case of the Polish-Belarusian Border Crisis 4. How Far-Right Post-Truth Tropes Shifted Germany's Migration Discourses Towards Exclusion and Securitisation: "There's Nothing Wrong in Saying That!" 5. The Post-Factual Deterioration of Debates on Migration in the Austrian Parliament: Breaking the Centre 6. Feelings of Abandonment by the EU and Emergence of Post-Truth Narratives in Italian Parliamentary Debates: Analysing the Promise Gap 7. When Post-Truth enters Parliament: Deconstructing Spanish Parliamentary Debates on Migration 8. Conflicting Discourses on Migration in the French Parliament: Emotions and the Great Replacement Fear 9. The Policy Implications of Anti-Immigrant Discourses in Hungary Since 2015: How Politics Became Captive to Post Truth 10. Conclusions: Post-truth Enabled and Constrained