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 Stepka 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