Narrating Crisis, Imagining Solidarity – The Narrative Politics of Migration

This paper develops a conceptual framework to analyse how crisis narratives shape political imaginaries and moral boundaries by structuring discourses of solidarity and exclusion. Focusing on forced migration as a key site of contestation, it reveals that political narratives do more than describe events—they delineate who belongs, deserves care, or is perceived as a threat. Drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe), affect theory (Ahmed), and narrative political theory (Ricoeur and Freeden), the paper conceptualises crises as affectively charged and discursively produced, reshaping imaginaries and political subjectivities. Through a critical reading of political, philosophical, and literary texts on forced displacement—one of the most contested issues of our time—it identifies three interrelated narrative mechanisms through which solidarity is constructed or foreclosed: (1) security scripting, which frames migrants as threats and legitimates sovereign control (Huysmans); (2) affective national belonging, which ties moral responsibility to cultural or territorial identity (Anderson and Malkki); (3) transnational vulnerability framing, which invokes shared precarity and interdependence to sustain post-national solidarities (Butler and Chouliaraki). Contrasting dominant, state-centric narratives—mobilised to reinforce exclusionary identities—with counter-narratives from grassroots solidarities and critical transnational discourse, the paper contributes to understanding how solidarity is narratively produced, contested, reimagined in an age of displacement and fractured belonging.