A Discourse Analysis of South African Parliamentary Committee Meetings on Asylum Policy

Abstract

Critical discursive psychology is used to analyze South African Parliamentary Committee Meeting discussions that address policy issues with asylum-seeker management. The purpose is to investigate how high-level policymakers in South Africa construct the definition and categorization of people applying for asylum to make up a narrative of illegitimacy. Further, the study aims to identify how parliamentarians and officials in the Department of Home Affairs justify their policy recommendations using this narrative. The research applies three theoretical frameworks, derived from studies of discursive psychology, to the South African context in order to produce systematic evidence for the narrative of illegitimacy. These frameworks are termed hostipitality, label distinction/conflation, and (de)humanization, which are each composed of a set of discursive devices that serve to portray groups of asylum seekers as illegitimate.