Introduction

Alan Kurdi's death unleashed an outpouring of expressions of compassion and calls for increased aid for refugees travelling to Europe. However, the sabre rattling soon began in parts of the British press and in Westminster (Greenslade, 2015). Two days after Alan's death, the Sun newspaper published an article under the headline ‘Bomb IS so Aylan didn't die in vain’. The article included an extended appeal from former soldier turned Conservative MP, Johnny Mercer, who called on David Cameron to extend the military action from Iraq into Syria to combat Islamic State (IS) (Newton Dunn, 2015). The article was published alongside one of Demir's photographs of Alan, and a photograph of a jubilant smiling IS fighter waving an IS flag. Mercer implored readers to ‘please remember how you felt on Thursday morning when you saw that dead boy’. The implication was that if people relived, and thus re-embodied, those feelings of horror and sadness they had felt, this would be a catalyst to propel them forward along the emotional journey into feelings of outrage and would mobilise their will to act against those identified as responsible for Alan's death, that is IS. The sense here is that people can determine the morally right course of action through listening to and reconnecting with their feelings – through ‘trusting their gut’. This does not require, and in fact actively discourages, nuance or more complex argument and debate (Berlant, 2005). On 3 December 2015, British MPs voted in favour of air strikes, which began immediately.

While compassion has been used to mobilise resistance to restrictive government refugee policies, this chapter explores how governments have also proclaimed compassion for ‘deserving’ migrants and refugees to justify the enactment of violent and punitive policies. Seemingly contradictory emotions of hostility and care have been made compatible through connecting compassion to the emotion of outrage, a practice commonly associated with activism (Clarke et al, 2006). It is posited that although hostile emotions have featured centrally within restrictive and exclusionary immigration and border enforcement, invocations of compassion have increasingly played a significant role and fused together with more familiar hostile emotions.