Lesvos Island : A Critical Discourse Analysis on the Local Daily Press

Sammanfattning: Since 2015, Greece has been in an unprecedented position. The Syrian civil war triggered the movement of more than 850,000 arrivals into Greece during 2015 (UNHCR, 2015). Being geographically situated as the closest European country to the east of Syria, Greece had to deal with a large increase in the number of migrating peoples to the country and by proxy, the European Union. This research seeks to understand how power relations between the island’s local population and its asylum seeker population are represented through an analysis of the discourse produced by the local daily press. In particular, the research reviews the discourse surrounding the island’s main square occupation by asylum seekers in April 2018. The theory of the established and outsiders is the framework used for the analysis, while Critical Discourse Analysis and General Inductive Approach constitutes the methodological ground of the thesis. The analysis showcases that Lesvos’ local daily press reproduces a discourse in line with the established and outsiders theory, attributing the local population as being established and the asylum seekers as being outsiders.