How crisis discourse shapes UK asylum governance: from framing to administrative practice
本文研究危机话语如何影响英国庇护治理，通过分析意识形态框架、议程设置和行政实践，揭示官僚失败如何被转化为合法化威慑的景观，并倡导以证据治理和行政负担审计作为对策。
This article explores how discourses of crisis shape aspects of UK asylum governance. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s ‘ideological square’ into conversation with framing and political-communication literatures, it suggests that an evaluative pattern (foregrounding ‘our’ positives and ‘their’ negatives while backgrounding counterexamples) informs agenda-setting, legislative change, and some administrative routines. Drawing on interview accounts from residents on their experiences of accommodation, precarious support systems, and administrative burden, it traces these dynamics through examples that include the issue of ‘asylum hotels’, showing how privatised contracts, backlog-driven contingency accommodation, and media optics convert bureaucratic failure into a spectacle that legitimises deterrence while obscuring governance design. Conceptually, the article extends the ideological square from discourse analysis to the epistemic architecture of government, showing how issue bias curates what counts as policy relevant truth. It concludes by advocating the ‘good governance of evidence’ and systematic auditing of administrative burdens as countermeasures to crisis-based legitimacy, recentring proportionality, legality, and protection within asylum policy.