Media Securitization in the Migration Crisis in Spain 2020–2021: The Case of Canary Islands and Ceuta

Abstract

Migrations are positioned as a security issue in a context marked by multidimensionality. One of the derivatives of the extension of the concept of security, which is evident in the case of migration policies, is the process of securitization. This concept, derived from constructivist approaches to international relations and security, particularly the Copenhagen School, explains how the political problems defined by the establishment of public policies end up in the field of security by the speech act of the main actors. In this sense, the theories of securitization are increasingly being studied in political communication research. This proposed chapter aims to measure the presence of security and human drama frames in the Spanish press during two specific migration crises; The crises of the Canary Islands (2020) and Ceuta (2021). We hypothesize that the press has undergone a process of media securitization as it happens in the coverage of armed conflicts. For this, we will resort to text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to study large volumes of information. This proposal, therefore, seeks to have a dual dimension: theoretical and methodological.