The visual politics of refugee return: Hegemonic visual grammar and affective governance in authoritarian media

Refugee arrivals have been widely analyzed, but the visual politics of return remain underexamined. This article examines how Syrians’ prospective return is visually framed in Türkiye’s polarized, increasingly authoritarian media during a critical conflict transition following the fall of the Assad regime. Analyzing 630 lead images from 10 major news outlets over a 32-day period (December 2024–January 2025), the authors identify three recurring visual logics: dehumanizing crowd management, conditional humanization at the threshold of farewell, and politician-centered visuality. Dehumanizing frames predominated, followed by politician-centered frames, while humanizing frames remained marginal. Crucially, a shared leader-centered hierarchy consistently places state actors at the center of the frame while refugees recede into the background, regardless of outlet political orientation. Drawing on Gramsci ( Selections from the Prison Notebooks , 1971) and Hall ( Encoding/Decoding , 1980), the authors theorize this persistence as a hegemonic visual grammar: a symbolic order reproduced across the political spectrum because it has been naturalized as the self-evident way political events are pictured.