Discursive diffusion of a security narrative - weaponization of migration on Poland’s and Lithuania’s eastern border

Abstract

This thesis examines how the framing of the EU-Belarus border crisis as “weaponised/instrumentalised migration” diffused across Lithuanian, Polish and European Union level political discourse between 2021 and 2023. This crisis marked a shift in how migration could be framed, as it was increasingly portrayed not as a societal or humanitarian challenge, but as a deliberate instrument of hybrid aggression orchestrated by the Belarusian regime against the European Union member states. While existing literature has examined the legal, humanitarian and security dimensions of the crisis, minimal attention has been given to the discursive process through which this framing emerged, spread and became institutionalized across different levels of governance. The theoretical framework combines securitization and Europeanisation theory in order to explain both the content of the framing and the mechanisms through which it travelled between different levels. The analysis focuses on three possible diffusion mechanisms of uploading, downloading and cross-loading. The empirical analysis applies qualitative discourse tracing to official communications from the offices of the President and Government of Lithuania and Poland, as well as from the European Council and European Commission Presidents. The study systematically traces the emergence, escalation and institutionalization of key formulations of wordings in the EU-Belarus crisis across the period from mid-2021 to 2023. The findings demonstrate that the diffusion of the framing followed multiple directions. The European Union institutions were the first to use the wording of “instrumentalisation”, which was later downloaded into Lithuanian and Polish communications. Lithuania developed the “hybrid attack” framing, which was subsequently uploaded to the European Union level. Poland adopted both of these framing through cross-loading and by downloading. The thesis contributes to the literature on migration securitization, Europeanisation and hybrid threats by providing a systematic empirical account of how the “weaponised/instrumentalised migration” framing diffused across levels of governance during the EU-Belarus border crisis. More broadly, the findings demonstrate how security framings can evolve through interaction between different actors, with each political level contributing different elements of the security discourse.