Mobilizing ‘Alan Kurdi' in pre-Brexit Britain

Chapter 3 presents the first case of visual border politics and examines conflicting mobilizations of the iconic image of ‘Alan Kurdi’ in policy discourses in different parts of the UK. More concretely, it explores how the British government and Scottish policymakers made the image relevant in contrasting ways when struggling to determine an appropriate policy response in light of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ 2015. The image is arguably the most iconic of the ‘crisis’ and widely considered to have shaped public attitudes and policies directly, also in the UK. Focusing on visual discursive practices and zooming into the situatedness of the visual border politics at play, the chapter examines how the image became affective and politically effective in pre-Brexit Britain by unpacking securitarian-humanitarian vis-à-vis humanitarian mobilizations of the image by the British government and Scottish policymakers and their relation to constitutions of collective identities. Doing so, it demonstrates how the same image can be mobilized to legitimate opposite policy reactions in different political settings and how domestic conflicts shape the mobilization and political performativity of images.