This chapter presents the theoretical framework that is applied in the study. We expect the management of the refugee crisis to be heavily shaped by the underlying political conflicts in the compound EU polity of nation-states, by the crisis situation that prevailed as a result of the policy-specific heritage, and the combination of problem and political pressures at both levels of this polity in interaction with a set of particular characteristics of the EU polity. The vertical and horizontal territorial conflicts that are typical of this compound polity are expected to have been exacerbated by two aspects of the crisis situation in particular – the limited number of competences of the EU in the policy domain of asylum policy and the asymmetrical incidence of the refugee crisis among the member statesWith respect to the outcomes of the crisis, we expect more continuity than change – in terms of both policy and conflict structures – and limited spillovers from policy to polity change.

Refugee crises around the world, especially the recent European migrant crisis, have highlighted the importance of the work done by volunteers. Drawing on a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach and based on a comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper articles, this chapter examines the construction of the volunteer identity through language use in the press by combining quantitative corpus techniques and qualitative methods. Among other findings, the results indicate a humanitarian discourse in which volunteerism is constructed as a helping activity.