Meaning-making in conjunctures: the affective-discursive framing of the 2024 Amsterdam violence as “failed integration” of migrants
Author(s)
Publication Name
Publication Date
Abstract
In November 2024, violence following a football match in Amsterdam was framed as evidence of migrant men’s failed integration into Dutch society. The frame achieved discursive dominance, anchoring public debate, and was adopted by the government before empirical substantiation. We examine the affective-discursive processes behind the frame’s salience amid conjunctural conditions and heightened collective anxieties. We conceptualize anxiety-fear arrangements as configurations of affective relations between socio-material elements. Frames, as meaning-making devices, organize meanings and orient emotions, shaping relations within arrangements. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of political statements, parliamentary transcripts and media items, we trace how the failed integration frame organized meanings, channeling collective anxieties onto tangible objects of fear: migranticized bodies, objects and places. The frame became salient through precedence, emotional intensity, cultural resonance and moral certainty. Empirically, we illustrate how bodies are ‘migranticized’ through framing. Conceptually, the anxiety-fear arrangement provides an operative template to understand meaning-making in conjunctures.
Topics
Discourse and Narrative Integration Migration: Immigration and Immigrants Main Topic: Other Sport: Football Antisemitism Conflict, Division and Controversy Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Reactions and Consequences Outside Region
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Copyright Info
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Original Language
DOI
Bibliographic Information
Meaning-making in conjunctures: the affective-discursive framing of the 2024 Amsterdam violence as “failed integration” of migrants. 2026: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/01419870.2026.2734283
