Humanization, Dehumanization, and Spectacularization: The Semiotics of UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales

Abstract

In this article, we examine the three Unfairy Tales advertising videos as part of the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Act of Humanity campaign, which depicts the stories of Syrian refugee children fleeing armed conflict. Shared on UNICEF’s digital platforms, these videos sensibilize the audience to the challenges these children have faced in their migrations and stimulate the adult public to contribute with donations. We argue that the advertisements’ obvious critique when contrasting the pain and despair with a fairy tale storytelling style reinforces obtuse elements. Following a semiotic approach based on postcolonial readings of the Other, we explore how the Unfairy Tales humanize, dehumanize, and spectacularize the three Syrian refugee children who narrate their experiences as it mediates the audience’s engagement with these stories. We suggest that the Unfairy Tales mediate the spectator’s relationship with these children-characters to orient political action toward maintaining a Western representation of childhood and accepting UNICEF’s role in managing humanitarian and migration “crisis” related to children. This article stimulates a dialogue between the critical literature on humanitarianism, childhood, and migration, promotes interdisciplinary discussions on semiotics, and contributes to critical engagements with digital humanitarian advertising.

Dans cet article, nous examinons les trois vidéos « Unfairy Tales » de la campagne Act of Humanity du Fonds des Nations Unies pour l'enfance (UNICEF). Elles représentent l'histoire d'enfants réfugiés syriens qui fuient un conflit armé. Partagées sur les plateformes numériques de l'UNICEF, ces vidéos sensibilisent le public aux défis que ces enfants ont connu lors de leur migration et incitent le public adulte à effectuer un don. Nous affirmons que la critique obvie de ces vidéos en opposant la douleur et le désespoir au style du récit de conte de fée renforce des éléments obtuses. En adoptant une approche sémiotique fondée sur des lectures postcoloniales de l'Autre, nous explorons l'humanisation, la déshumanisation et la spectacularisation des trois enfants réfugiés syriens quand ils racontent leur expérience dans ces vidéos qui servent d'intermédiaires pour le public confronté à ces histoires. Nous suggérons que ces vidéos servent d'intermédiaires à la relation du spectateur avec ces personnages-enfants afin d'orienter l'action politique vers le maintien d'une représentation occidentale de l'enfance et l'acceptation du rôle de l'UNICEF dans la gestion de la « crise » humanitaire et migratoire relative aux enfants. Cet article incite au dialogue entre la littérature critique sur l'humanitarisme, l'enfance et la migration, promeut les discussions interdisciplinaires sur la sémiotique et contribue aux engagements critiques avec la publicité humanitaire numérique.

En este artículo, estudiamos los tres videos publicitarios de Unfairy Tales (cuentos sin hadas) como parte de la campaña Act of Humanity (acto humanitario) del Fondo de las Naciones Unidas para la Infancia (UNICEF), los cuales muestran las historias de niños refugiados sirios que huyen del conflicto armado. Estos videos fueron difundidos en las plataformas digitales de UNICEF y sensibilizan al público sobre los desafíos a los que estos niños se han enfrentado durante sus migraciones y animan al público adulto a contribuir con donaciones. Argumentamos que la crítica obvia de los anuncios al contrastar el dolor y la desesperación con un estilo narrativo de cuento de hadas refuerza ciertos elementos obtusos. Seguimos un enfoque semiótico basado en las lecturas poscoloniales del Otro y exploramos cómo los Unfairy Tales humanizan, deshumanizan y espectacularizan a los tres niños refugiados sirios que narran sus experiencias, ya que median en el compromiso de la audiencia con estas historias. Sugerimos que los Unfairy Tales median en la relación del espectador con estos niños-personajes con el fin de orientar la acción política hacia el mantenimiento de una representación occidental de la infancia y la aceptación del papel de UNICEF en la gestión de la «crisis» humanitaria y migratoria relacionada con los niños. Este artículo estimula un diálogo entre la literatura crítica en materia de humanitarismo, infancia y migración, promueve discusiones interdisciplinarias en materia de semiótica y contribuye a los compromisos críticos con la publicidad humanitaria digital.

Introduction

In 2016, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in collaboration with Studio 180LA produced three audiovisual animations under the Unfairy Tales series of the Act of Humanity campaign, based on the experiences of migrant and refugee children from the civil war in Syria (2011). It aimed to sensibilize an audience mainly through social media and raise funds by showcasing the children’s story in a fairy tale style. According to the 180LA Executive Creative Directors, “[t]he Unfairy Tales picture with heartbreaking detail what it’s really like to be a child in that situation, showing that some stories were never meant for children. We needed to tell these stories to make everyone think about it” (UNICEF 2016a).

In this article, we use the Unfairy Tales as a portrayal of the humanitarian discourse to analyze symbolically and visually the representations of Syrian refugee children. We reflect on three animations: “Malak and the Boat,” “Mustafa goes for a walk,” and “Ivine and Pillow” (UNICEF 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). These stories show a conflict between the horror of the war and its impacts on the children’s lives when fleeing from their homes and the ludic way they are told. By analyzing these animations, we want to suggest that, despite successfully playing this contrast as a critique and humanizing these children, their plots depict a specific imagination of childhood as a migrant fleeing armed conflict that dehumanizes and spectacularizes these people-characters¹ in their escape from the war in Syria, as well as the roles of UNICEF and the audience.

Drawing from Barthes (1977, 1978), Balibar (2006), Muppidi (2012), and Kurasawa (2015), we explore these stories semiotically with a postcolonial lens. Focused on image-based discussions, semiotics discusses the violence² in producing any visual language in its basic units: signs, meanings, and signifiers. Our argument dialogues with these authors because they problematize the silences and arbitrariness in socio-political relations, which are mobilized imagetically with binaries such as obvious/obtuse and the notion of the “stranger.”

Hence, this article contributes to the ongoing postcolonial critiques of the humanitarian discourse while putting into dialogue the critical literature on humanitarianism, childhood, and migration (Doty 1999; Watson 2006; Mutua 2001; Bhabha 2015; Rajaram 2021). Although we recognize the theoretical developments promoted notably by the linguistic and aesthetic turns in international relations (IR), we follow (Shapiro 1988) and Fontes, Herz, and Medeiros (2019) to underscore how limited semiotic discussions developed by Barthes have been in the discipline. Thus, exploring the Unfairy Tales semiotically aims to enrich the methodological debates in other fields. Finally, we hope to stimulate more critical engagements with digital humanitarian advertising. As Chouliaraki (2006, 2010), Johnson (2011), and Georgiou (2018) show, the content of humanitarian advertisement campaigns should not be taken for granted as it can reinforce the socio-political representations and hierarchies within the humanitarian discourse.

The rest of the article is divided as follows. The subsequent section explores the role of semiotics in our argument, highlighting the sequential art model as a new advertisement style to convey information and mobilize the audience to donate to UNICEF’s campaign. Next, we present the three Unfairy Tales of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine to underscore the humanitarian discourse’s audiovisual elements. Then, we discuss how this campaign humanizes, dehumanizes, and spectacularizes these children.

A Semiological Analysis of the Unfairy Tales’ Sequential Art Model

In recent decades, numerous interdisciplinary approaches have developed conceptualizations of semiotics. For Roland Barthes (1977, 2), semiotics problematizes the signifying units of discourse as a constitutive part of linguistics. It studies systems of signs, images, gestures, sounds, rites, protocols, and spectacles. In structural terms, semiotics focuses on the relationship between language/speech, meaning/signifier, syntagm/system, and connotation/denotation that constitute language, its systems of signification, and the production of meanings. According to Allen (2003, 18), Barthes is one of the few writers who established the foundations for modern literary and cultural theory relevant to IR³. Following Der Derian and Shapiro (1989, XIX), Barthes demonstrates how things come to have meanings by being part of a culture and how meanings precede them. For Barthes, to see the world as a text is to confront the issue of meaning in a radically new way.

Journalistic, photographic, and cinematographic contents tend to be the most analyzed and problematized materials by semiotics. When we semiotically analyze UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales, we identify that its storytelling technique follows the sequential art model. Sequential art is the term coined by Will Eisner, a theorist of modern comics, to define an art form that uses images implanted in sequence to tell a story or convey information. In other words, it produces a dialogical relationship through the polarization and complementarity between image (form) and narrative (content). The term also applies to comics, panels, films, and animations (Eisner 1999, 6–8). This technique immediately allows for greater engagement by the reader/viewer because its content and images are intentionally programmed and directed. Regarding advertising goals, this model is more effective than a “realistic” report because it builds a symbolic-cultural relationship with the audience, instrumentalizing ludic, and pedagogical narratives to create feelings of proximity and belonging.

Following Barthes (1978, 54–5), we analyze the semiology of UNICEF’s sequential art model from the interaction between obvious and obtuse: “Obvious means which comes ahead and this is exactly the case with this meaning, which comes to seek me out (. . .). Obtusus means that which is blunted, rounded inform.” In other words, the obvious is all the visual content that the producer and the viewer can capture instantly. If there is any criticism of the message, it is limited to first impressions and possible inaccuracies. Alternatively, the obtuse corresponds to the visual content that the producer and the viewer cannot or do not intend to capture when accessing the advertisement. Simply put, the obtuse is everything that remains in the shadows: the subliminal, subtle, silent, and decontextualized messages that exert a high degree of violence and subordination, especially for those who are unaware of the sociocultural contexts permeating the people-characters’ stories. Working with the obtuse means inferring and making explicit unspoken contexts surrounding the obvious.

Following Kurasawa’s (2015, 3–6) critique that Western humanitarianism is based on a historical and cultural system of arbitrariness, asymmetries, and inequalities, we expand Barthes’ semiology, observing its strengths and limitations in the humanitarian context. Within the scope of limitations, we mobilize a postcolonial semiology to uncover the Western humanitarian movement that has rested on the belief that seeing images of acute vulnerability and suffering has moral implications for the viewer. Thus, we suggest that the manifestation of the relationship between the obvious and the obtuse and, consequently, the instrumentalization of semiotics by UNICEF occurs through advertisements that praise images linked to human suffering (Stephens 1995; Manzo 2006, 2008; Malkki 2015). They depict “vulnerable” groups, such as women, children, and refugees, who remain portrayed merely as victims of armed conflicts and humanitarian tragedies predominantly in the Global South (Burman 1994; Cunningham 2005; Nayar 2009; Tabak and Carvalho 2018; Vandermass-Peeler, Subotic, and Barnett 2024).

In the Unfairy Tales, the obvious corresponds to the criticism UNICEF does when contrasting the upbeat and pleasant storytelling style of fairy tales with the horrors these children face with the war in Syria and the precariousness and violence of migration. In these representations, it is up to socio-political actors from the Global North to find solutions that mitigate or end armed conflicts and develop mechanisms capable of safeguarding Syrian refugee children. In opposition, the obtuse operates based on sociocultural erasures of these stories’ historical and socio-cultural contexts. In the advertising campaigns produced by UNICEF, socio-political actors disregard the fact that the “problems” of the Global South, such as the Syrian civil war and the migration “crisis,”⁴ stem from paternalistic systems of exploitation, violence, and submission. Thus, the semiotics routinely constructed in the Global North silence and decontextualize armed conflicts and humanitarian tragedies, attributing only economic-political and sociocultural responsibility to Global South societies.

Disseminating images of human suffering, global socio-political actors seek to mitigate pain, stimulate feelings of Judeo-Christian⁵ compassion, and raise funds to keep international institutions and their partners active. UNICEF’s campaign not only aims to co-opt children but also targets adults who are their “true and sole guardians” because they have autonomy and financial independence, allowing and authorizing donations (Rajaram 2002  Johnson 2011; Duffield 2018). International institutions like UNICEF win the “hearts and minds” of individuals transnationally, regardless of economic-political differences or sociocultural relations between populations/countries, by taking over international public opinion through images of human suffering. These campaigns aim to produce an atmosphere that compels the audience to be direct and/or indirect participants in humanitarian issues. Actively and/or passively interacting with the content, the viewer feels responsible and complicit in humanitarian tragedies and, therefore, aspires to action (Chouliaraki 2006, 2010; Muppidi 2012; Kurasawa 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2015).

To this end, it is necessary to mobilize some supposedly universal values ​​based on ethical-moral principles to overcome geographical and ethnic-racial borders that hinder the will to help humanitarian provision (Campbell and Shapiro 1999; Douzinas 2000; Bleiker et al. 2013; Orford 2016). Hence, UNICEF’s chosen storytelling style follows an important technical basis as it promotes content resonance aiming for greater empathy and minimizing the viewer’s reactivity and rejection of the story. For instance, this sequential art strategy becomes noticeable in the drawing techniques: the less realistic the image and the fewer photographic details in the iconic representation, the greater the possibility of the viewer identifying themselves with the narrative (McCloud 1994; Eisner 1999; Dorfman and Mattelart 2020).

Thus, UNICEF’s stories of migrant and refugee children follow narrative genres such as drama and horror that reiterate binaries and oversimplifications. These stories are developed through characters that follow archetypes, such as heroes/villains and victims/perpetrators, and mobilize a linear narrative structure, with a delineated beginning, middle, and end (Todorov 1992; Moulin 2016; de Oliveira 2019; França 2023; Freistein, Gadinger, and Groth 2024). Generally, the videos produced in the campaign are short, on average 2 min, characterized by text and video editing that mixes sadness, joy, and ecstasy. The plot follows the child-character’s narration about their challenges in fleeing the armed conflict in Syria, combining dual and opposing views based on light/shadow, good/evil, and just/unjust. At the end of their journeys, a set of socio-political discourses is translated into a moral lesson, a storytelling technique to convey a message or instruction.

The videos conclude with testimonies from the Syrian children whose life experiences inspired the animations. They use a single-shot technique to obtain more information from an interviewee. This strategy considers the environment and the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee. In documentaries, the single shot aims to objectively extract information from the interviewee using a closed frame in an austere setting. In the Unfairy Tales, however, this technique needed to value sensitivity between the interviewer, the interviewee, and other people who make up the setting to create a playful, harmonious, and friendly environment when interviewing Syrian children. That change aimed to make them feel more comfortable when saying some words and/or phrases that refer to experiences marked by violence. It is worth noting that the “real” child, whose voice narrates the story, is only allowed a few seconds of footage with their face to highlight their suffering and anguish. In a rough cut, the children’s image is replaced by a universal message that reinforces the idea of ​​humanitarian aid. On a black screen with sky blue letters that symbolize UNICEF (and the United Nations), the videos show the following message: “Some stories were never meant for children. You can change the story for children like [Malak/Mustafa/Ivine] with an act of humanity” (UNICEF 2016b, 2016c, 2016d).

Regarding the peculiarities of the Act of Humanity campaign, it is noteworthy that its format was designed for social media, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Nevertheless, this type of advertisement was already present in the 1960s and 1990s, when television operated as the main means of communication. Then, viewers were imagined as atomic masses, that is, passive, alienated, and subordinate to the dynamics of capitalism (Nadel 1997; Adorno 2001; Dorfman and Mattelart 2020). In the first decades of the twenty-first century, international organizations began to invest in advertisements on the agendas of children and childhood, as well as asylum, migration, borders, and citizenship, in which sound and image worked together but were not limited to television. On the contrary, they sought the viewer’s direct and participatory access in the digital realm, amplifying the feeling of compassion on an individual level. Viewers would engage in real-time through the comments posted on the profiles/channels that vary concerning the language and informality used, as well as the offensive and/or polite language (Shapiro 1988; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Debrix 2003; Chouliaraki 2010; Duffield 2018).

There are diverse and hybrid humanitarian advertisements that use digital sound effects, improved costume design, enhanced content direction and editing, and stylized scriptwriting. Specifically for animations, such as the Unfairy Tales, storytelling techniques have become a new way of producing, circulating, and transmitting narratives playfully, maintaining the drama of refugee and migrant children. They increase humanitarian provisions and donations since “the heart of this new style of humanitarian communication offers both the tentative promise of new practices of altruism and the threat of cultural narcissism” (Chouliaraki 2010, 107).

By using digital platforms and social networks, advertisement campaigns developed by the North about the Global South have aimed to expand mechanisms of financial donation through a sociocultural relationship that encourages proximity and distance with the viewer (Manzo 2008; Johnson 2011; Sontag 2013; Weiss 2013; Kurasawa 2015). On the one hand, the images created and transmitted by digital platforms and social networks approximate the viewer to the suffering Other, conveying feelings of consternation and mourning through aesthetic elements such as colorimetry and photographic framing. On the other hand, the viewer is apart from the violence and horror of the Other’s situation, able to turn the digital device off and/or roll their feed. As we argue below, the viewer is expected to engage actively and passively with the advertisements in UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales. In the next section, we introduce in more detail each narrative of this campaign.

Unfairy Tales: The Stories of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine

Before presenting our interpretation and analysis of the campaign, it is important to contextualize the children’s start-point setting: the humanitarian tragedy of the war in Syria. The conflict began in 2011, within the context of the Arab Spring,⁶ when there was a series of protests against the corruption of the Bashar al-Assad government. Since then, it has stimulated a significant migration flow, especially of unaccompanied children who cross the Mediterranean to reach the European Union, accumulating challenging experiences. According to the UNICEF report (2016e) “Refugee and migrant children in Europe,” around 100,000 refugees and migrants who traveled from Syria used land routes and, mainly, sea routes, such as the Mediterranean Sea. In 2016 alone, the year the Unfairy Tales campaign was launched, around 15 percent of refugees were children. Most Syrian refugees who entered Europe moved around neighboring countries or regions (UNICEF 2016e).

Despite unaccompanied children participating in previous migration flows, the current socio-political context includes new forms of control, monitoring, and population surveillance (Menjívar and Perreira 2017, 198). Papadopoulos (2023, 33–4) points out the harsh experiences of refugee camps by highlighting the silences and violence that circumscribe the trajectories of Syrian refugee children. When reflecting on the trajectories of unaccompanied refugee children, which is not the case for all child-characters in the Unfairy Tales, the author underscores the challenges encountered in the exhaustive search for safety. In the name of “protection,” the widespread use of detention practices, emergency protection zones, legal assistance, and essential services are some types of humanitarian violations in refugee camps.

Furthermore, the “migration crisis” led to the creation of agreements, for example, between the European Union and Turkey. According to Rygiel, Baban, and Ilcan (2016, 316–8), these agreements outline initiatives to jointly address the “humanitarian crisis” by managing irregular migration and refugees to Europe. In this case, Turkey agreed to accept the return of irregular migrants from Europe and, in exchange, will send Syrian refugees present in its territory for resettlement in Europe—a type of population exchange. For the authors, the European Commission has justified this as a way to stop irregular migration through dangerous routes and replace it with a more organized resettlement process. However, resettlement is also the target of constant criticism due to its vulnerabilities, abuses, and exploitation. As non-European migrants and refugees, Syrians in Turkey have only temporary protection status, which imposes restrictions on their ability to access citizenship rights, regular employment, and permanent residence status. According to Baban, Ilcan, and Rygiel (2016, 4–5), although the legislation regulating the temporary protection regime clarifies the rights of applicants and the obligations of government officials, it does not establish a framework that would enable Syrian refugees to plan their long-term settlement in Turkey. Therefore, liberal and discriminatory violence prevails through the production and maintenance of racial boundaries against Syrian refugees and migrants (Isakjee et al. 2020, 1751–3).

Therefore, even though these political and legal instruments aim to mitigate the suffering of refugee children, we understand that they do not prevent the establishment and maintenance of violence mobilized by international institutions responsible for protecting their lives, such as UNICEF. In digital advertising campaigns, these humanitarian violations are ignored and, above all, silenced, thus endorsing the altruistic capitalism typical of White subjects’ salvationism (Pallister-Wilkins 2015). We now turn to analyzing the three videos provided by UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales. We present each story as narrated by the children-characters, emphasizing semiotic elements that reinforce the production of an identity/difference relationship as a form of power, violence, and communication of what childhood is as a migrant fleeing war.

Malak and the Boat

As the shortest animation in the Unfairy Tales and with the youngest narrator (7 years old), Malak’s story is told in 1 minutes and 57 seconds (UNICEF 2016b). It begins with a starry sky, but as it goes downward, Malak is introduced on a boat crossing during a thunderstorm. The sound design depicts an exciting and adventurous tone. The clouds’ warm colors (e.g., red, purple, and black) contrast with Malak’s fellow travelers, including her mother, who are poorly defined black silhouettes with bright dot-eyes. The viewer can identify Malak’s mother through a simple yet symbolic gesture, she places her hands on Malak’s shoulders, underscoring the union and separation between the two characters in their journey.

Malak narrates her fear of the sea as the waves flood the crowded boat, and a gigantic octopus-like monster appears, a terrifying representation of the brutality of the weather and the broader adversities refugees face. This fantastical element accompanies a switch in the sound design to suspenseful music, preparing the audience for the worst parts of the story. The scene changes to an underwater point of view as if all the people were pushed out of the boat. Malak is the only survivor of the storm. As the only one still on the boat, her stylized countenance is marked by sadness, strengthening the viewer’s empathy with her. She is curved frontally and, in the background, a new day appears endorsed by the radiant sun representing better days. Reminiscing on her friends back home, Malak realizes she is now alone. She brushes her tears as she did the water during the storm, and the image goes to a plan view, visually demonstrating Malak’s little boat against the ocean’s vastness.

Unlike the ensuing videos, in which the cartoon image shifts to the “real” person, there is a subtle break between these two scenes with UNICEF’s informative text. When the “true” Malak appears, she shifts her gaze to two places, her possible interviewer and upwards, as she introduces herself. The animation creates a double discomfort for the viewer: Malak’s uneasiness when trying to remember her age becomes the viewer’s discomfort watching such a young child being interviewed and asked to narrate a horrifying story.

Mustafa Goes for a Walk

Mustafa’s animation uses pastel colors and starts with the sound of carousels spinning in an amusement park. As a 13-year-old, he narrates a journey of deep losses and permanent war in 2 minutes and 15 seconds (UNICEF 2016c). With a background of several helicopters flying over and dropping bombs on Syria, Mustafa’s family is gathered for dinner. He tells the audience how the men were taken against their will because of the war while, visually, one can see these family members exploding and disappearing, leaving only a puff of smoke behind. Mustafa is now alone. His house begins to show cracks from the bombings, and he is forced to abandon it to look for shelter. While his narration affirms that his family is scattered in different places, the storytelling shows him going on a journey on his own, constantly emphasizing his loneliness.

A new day dawns in the desert as Mustafa walks carrying two toys, a robot and a plush animal, which he hugs closer as a sign of comfort. There is only him, the toys, and the desert. Night comes and Mustafa climbs a mountain. His companions increase so much in size that bridging them with him becomes unbearable. Thus, Mustafa leaves his toys behind to continue his path. Abandoned, the robot and the plush animal are left in tears, mirroring the suffering that refugee children experience as they are separated from their families. The sun is up again in the sky as Mustafa sees his new “home” on the horizon, a refugee camp. He contemplates his situation and the ever-present possibility of death during his “walk.” The image quickly switches from a two-dimensional upper view of the camp to Mustafa walking around. Mustafa continues being alone here: he does not have anyone who speaks his language or someone with whom he can play. He misses home and his friends, but sees no alternative to his situation.

The animation stops to allow the “real” Mustafa to comment “Who would I make friends with? There is no one” while lowering his head to the ground crestfallen (UNICEF 2016c). As a play with different viewpoints, the camera’s angle positions Mustafa on the right-hand side with a seemingly empty refugee camp unfocused in the background. He is the protagonist, so the camera aims to capture his expressions and lines in extreme detail. Yet, it also blurs the scenario around him, which the filmmakers do not seek to capture. Approximating and distancing through the camera’s shutter and sensors in a bokeh effect, the audience sees Mustafa’s abrupt testimony as a metaphor for his journey: he is alone.

Ivine and Pillow

In 2 minutes and 35 seconds, this animation tells the story of Ivine, a 14-year-old refugee, and her pillow-sidekick named Pillow (UNICEF 2016d). The first takes depict images from top to bottom showing several missiles and bombs falling from the sky, attacking, and killing the Syrian population. A happy sound design contrasts with Ivine’s introduction to the audience: she is hiding under a table in her living room. The overflowing tears and the frightened way Ivine looks at Pillow show the latter’s supportive role throughout the story, which would not interact with expressions or feelings in real life. This terrifying event traumatizes Ivine and her mother, a Muslim woman who has no lines but shows agency by pulling her child to flee. Despite this horror, the plot does not worry about the bombs’ precedence and socio-political implications. Instead, we follow this child, her mother, and Pillow in a light and cheerful narrative.

Faced with destroyed buildings and blood puddles, a frightened Ivine seeks comfort in Pillow and the next sequence begins. In dark tonal images, we follow Ivine’s story about fleeing from Syria. Fastpacing images depict the characters’ movement. First comes the sea-crossing in an inflatable boat and the possibility of drowning. The adults around her share this feeling instead of reassuring her. Although they survived the crossing, more is to come. Ivine and her mother walk an impossible distance through different terrains, such as forests, deserts, and mountains. They wake up hungry, they go to sleep hungry. Ivine, her mother, and Pillow sleep in the wilderness.

Finally “safe,” Ivine’s character is having nightmares despite finding a protected place to rest, stressing the pain and trauma related not only to forced displacement but also the violence inherent to the war. In her dreams, Pillow gains a more expressive face, arms, and legs to defend her from personified missiles running after her. She wakes up crying and these tears fall from her face to her pillow. Ivine’s tears become Pillow’s tears as a visual demonstration of comfort. Keeping with a sad piano in the background, the image changes to the “real” Ivine, who is allowed a few seconds of video to say “I feel so sad, why is life so hard?” Immediately, the scene changes again to the black background with UNICEF’s Act of Humanity campaign without altering the sound design (UNICEF 2016d). On the one hand, the story ends in sadness and pain, reminding the audience of Ivine and Pillow’s suffering during their trajectory toward safety in an unnamed shelter. On the other hand, it concludes with a message of hope and compassion as it invites the audience to help Ivine through UNICEF.

The Stranger’s Face and Testimony: Humanization and Dehumanization of Syrian Refugee Children in Humanitarian Discourse

By tracing the stories of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine, we highlight the existence and maintenance of a humanitarian discourse whose main objective is to co-opt the spectator through a semiology that explores a relationship between obvious and obtuse. The humanitarian discourse uses language games between the representation and the represented to mobilize ethical and moral values and absorb the spectator into this logic. As a catalyst, the humanitarian discourse aims to recognize the humanity in each individual despite differences in gender, race, and/or class (Boltanski 1999; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Fassin 2012; Georgiou 2018). Crucial to this is the Other’s face, whose imperative of recognition allows and enhances the relationship of solidarity that must exist between all individuals (Campbell 1998; Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015).

The face conveys who or what should be seen, whether presented as a threat and insecurity and/or as stable and innocent. Through the face, humanitarian advertising campaigns can mobilize processes of humanization and dehumanization. In the contemporary world characterized by armed conflicts, internal displacements, and struggles for political rights, recognizing and, above all, esteeming someone else’s humanity becomes vital. For example, recognizing humanity in the face of the Other can help in the sociocultural confrontation against the xenophobic policies reiterated by states that patrol borders and exercise surveillance mechanisms and population control based on facial identification (Campbell 1998; Bigo 2006; Huysman 2006; Agier 2016).

In studies on childhood that relate to refugee agendas and armed conflicts, the facial features of the migrant population are a crucial part of the analysis of the refugees’ trajectories. Analyzing faces highlights their humanization and dehumanization. On the one hand, the humanization of the migrant population’s face seeks to exalt their individuality to avoid possible homogenization or essentialisms. On the other hand, the dehumanization of the face occurs with a semiology that aims to universalize, homogenize, and essentialize refugee populations, especially those linked to advertising campaigns (Haddad 2008; Edkins 2015; Lavenex 2024).

When Soguk (1999), Balibar (2006), Mégret (2006), and Bauman (2016) reflect on global governance and the aporias involving transnational citizenship, they ask how the construction of the Other’s face follows the historical-political category of the “stranger” in contrast to the notion of “threat,” commonly evoked in these contexts. For the authors, the category “strange” is not something natural. On the contrary, it is produced and reproduced according to political actors’ demands. Although strangeness can be associated with a “threat,” this connection does not have a fixed, stable nodal point, being instead mobile and unstable (Balibar 2006, 5). Generally, the faces of strangers do not need to have voices, gestures, or speech, they simply need to convey the feeling of suffering, constant and latent pain, and compassion to produce consternation in the viewer.

As stressed in the first section, vulnerable groups (such as women, children, and refugees) have been protagonists in advertisements developed by international organizations employing a humanitarian discourse. These campaigns humanize and dehumanize their faces when they portray these groups as mere victims of social injustices and economic and political inequalities (Nayar 2009; Vandermass-Peeler, Subotic, and Barnett 2024). Hence, UNICEF advertising campaigns routinely construct political and media framings that aim to legitimize the characters’ faces, to sensitize the viewer by exploring feelings of compassion and distress. Framings are an obligatory part of an advertising campaign as they regulate and control the public’s interpretation: “we must be aware that it is not merely a visual image awaiting interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, sometimes forcibly so” (Butler 2016, 71). Using the faces of “strangers,” the Unfairy Tales aimed to underscore their facial expressions, contours, and speech, allowing the identification of the characters’ humanization and, consequently, producing forms of identification with the viewer.

Based on the videos of UNICEF’s advertising campaign, we highlight some semiotic aspects of their faces, mainly underlining the media framework that humanizes and dehumanizes their testimonies. Regarding Malak’s trajectory, her face translates the despair, pain, and sadness not only for her companions on the boat, including her mother, who died during the crossing, but also considering the uncertainty of what is to come. She has a different imagery composition than the other children-characters in the campaign, notably in designed features, concerning color, style, and liveliness. Malak’s humanization manifests through compassion and solidarity in her face as one sees her tears. As for dehumanization, we highlight the faces of the other characters who are just black figures and bright eyes—completely strange and irrelevant to the main point of the campaign—and do not deserve to have expressions, so they are homogenized. Malak’s dehumanization can be seen in the violent camera play that invades her personal space and body by zooming and going through her left eye. In the sequential art storytelling technique, the eyes are the channel for sociocultural communication and intervention. Through her eyes, the audience experiences Malak’s life and pain, the trauma of facing aquatic monsters, and the hardship related to the migration process. By trespassing on Malak’s body, the camera also invades her soul, laying bare and vulnerable the child-character that UNICEF also wishes to humanize (UNICEF 2016b).

Mustafa’s rounded face is typical of 1990s animations, referring to empty, opaque, and melancholic expressions. Although sadness, tiredness, and pain sweep Mustafa’s eyes most of the time, the outline of his face, especially his gaze, mobilizes joy, and comfort to the animated toys accompanying him. In search of a safe place, Mustafa’s face expresses exhaustion through his tortuous walk even when he arrives at the refugee camp. Mustafa’s humanization is noticeable on his face through his eyes and eyebrows. Regarding body language, the upward and slightly curved eyebrow movement conveys astonishment, as one does not believe they are experiencing this situation. Examples of humanization through the movement of the eyes and eyebrows in the sequential art model storytelling technique are when Mustafa tries to reach his family members who become smoke at the beginning of the video and looks down when he realizes he is alone and when he closes his eyes while abandoning his toys, demonstrating the pain of separation. Another aspect involves Mustafa’s arrival at the refugee camp. Once again, the storytelling technique appears when the child-character arches his eyebrows in front of the horizon as a possibility of hope. His dehumanization occurs, for example, when Mustafa looks from one side to the other in the refugee camp, looking for someone to connect with. When he fails to find anyone, he starts crying. Therefore, abandonment clashes with the camp’s hospitality⁷. Again, one observes the rawness of Mustafa’s eyes as the narration shows the sadness and loneliness that inundates the absence of friends and family in his life (UNICEF 2016c).

Finally, we highlight the expressions on Ivine’s face, the child-character who resembles a human in the animation style the most. Ambiguously, her humanization and dehumanization are the most present when she is unable to process and/or understand the chaotic situations in her story. Her countenance showcases a lost and vulnerable Ivine as she faces her reflection in a pool of blood. As the storytelling leads her through a fast sequence to describe her fleeing Syria with her mother, her face denotes restlessness and despair as she looks down and her body struggles to breathe. Her nightmares humanize her as the audience can sympathize with the fear and the comfort she finds in Pillow. The exchange of looks between the human and the inanimate being, the latter becoming alive and protecting her from the personified missiles, also manifests the dehumanization and precariousness of Ivine’s situation (UNICEF 2016d).

Regardless of styles and details, we emphasize how all the representations of human beings in these videos do not necessarily refer to the “real” images of Syrian refugees. There is a gap and a homogenization between the representation and the represented children-characters. That way, other refugee children could replace Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine, and it would perhaps not change the UNICEF campaign’s goal. Even so, the campaign aims to create a specific bond between the audience and these three children. In an interview, the Creative Editor of Studio 180LA stated that

These films highlight the human story and experiences of the young refugees and migrants, they aren’t anonymous stories you can’t put a face to. (…) This is Malak. This is Ivine. This is Mustafa. By showing the children’s stories one-by-one we ultimately build a sense of solidarity amongst refugee and migrant communities as well as the global community at large (Marques 2017, emphasis added).

The mobilization of these children’s faces does not end there, as the “real” child appears for a few seconds at the end of each video. The digital advertising campaign displays the humanization and dehumanization of these “real” children through their tears, downcast expressions, and reddened and pale faces. Thus, we suggest that the campaign aims to encourage viewers to feel embarrassed and uncomfortable, causing them to feel compassion and help the children by supporting UNICEF. To this end, images circulate using semiotics that demonstrate the degrading, violent, and vulnerable conditions that Syrian refugee children experience in armed conflicts and migration processes. By discussing the relationship between the obvious and the obtuse, we argue that UNICEF humanizes Syrian refugee children when the stories ratify that they deserve and need to be protected by international organizations. Supported by a possible humanization, however, the Unfairy Tales reproduce violence when extracting the testimonies of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine—seen as survivors of tragic migratory stories. Dehumanizing strangers’ faces, the Unfairy Tales depoliticizes the agencies of Syrian refugee children as the advertisements reduce their speeches to small and simple fragments. This depoliticization manifests when the collected testimonies aim to promote discourses based on universal visions of humanity and the understanding that children are passive and innocent beings.

For Agamben (1999), the testimony is a way to access an exceptional experience. Concerning the statement of survivors of armed conflict, persecution, and violence, as is the case of the Syrian refugee children, there is an ambivalence in its authenticity because the testimony resides in the realm of the impossible. The author underscores that the only valid testimony is that from those who did not survive the narrated occurrence for they are the ones who truly lived it. Nonetheless, their retelling is inviable, so the media needs to work with what remains of this experience, that is, the living witnesses. Collecting a testimony requires “the acute awareness that what can—and must—be narrated is not essential, since the essential cannot be said” (Agamben 1999, 37).

Hence, UNICEF exhaustively defends the humanitarian discourse in its media campaigns, praising the defense of human and humanitarian rights. Nonetheless, the advertisements decontextualize and ignore the “origins” of the armed conflicts in Syria, the Global North’s historical interference in the region, and the local civil society resistance. Campaigns such as the Unfairy Tales present the trajectories of Syrian refugee children, establishing a homogenizing and unidirectional political narrative when describing the characters’ trajectories based on their migration processes. UNICEF’s mediation of these children’s stories erases and silences other historical perspectives that could destabilize the official or officialized narratives of the armed conflicts in Syria (Huysman 2006; Moulin and Nyers 2007; Haddad 2008; Bhabha 2015; Agier 2016).

Based on Spivak (2010), we suggest that UNICEF produced ambiguous advertisements. On the one hand, they granted voice and space to Syrian refugee children by allowing them to narrate and describe their stories and trajectories. On the other hand, UNICEF only allowed these stories to be disseminated through their media since they can be instrumentalized for stimulating donations. As Georgiou (2018) states, including the voices of refugees and migrants in digital campaigns does not necessarily guarantee the recognition of their agency. On the contrary, this inclusion only reveals the exploitation of opportunities and restrictions for refugees and migrants to speak about their own stories and trajectories against the representational order that assumes a homogeneity of agency and experience.

Following Spivak (2010) and Georgiou (2018), we problematize the digital campaigns through the verbs to speak/talk. Speaking generally focuses on the speaker and is often imagined as one-way communication. On the other hand, talking focuses on the orator and at least one listener and can mean “having a conversation,” dismissing a monotonous, unidirectional, and homogeneous perspective on the topic. For talking, there is a reflective and contestatory dialogic process. Regardless of a vertical relationship between the parties, talking assumes dialogue and mutual respect are essential during established conversations and their mediations. However, that does not mean canceling and/or recognizing the symbolic violence in dialogues.

As such, we understand that the testimonies of Syrian refugee children narrating and describing their journey in the Unfairy Tales were mediated and controlled. UNICEF determined who should be heard and how to see, hear, and interpret the Syrian refugee children’s stories. Although UNICEF’s advertising objective is to create a mutual dialogue between the audience, the institution, and the Syrian refugee children through talking, we suggest that this practice is illusory. Speaking prevails because the audience cannot engage mutually with the children whose voices they hear throughout the storytelling and the faces they see in the single-shot interview part; they can only support UNICEF to help abstract children in the future. When the audience interacts with the campaign by posting comments on UNICEF’s official YouTube channel, for instance, they do not talk to Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine. Rather, UNICEF channel administrators mediate all possible and appropriate responses. Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine do not participate further in this process apart from providing their testimonies, which act as a starting point for the campaigns. As a result, we question what types of speech subalterns can have within humanitarian discourse as we highlight the instrumentalization of their experiences to humanize and dehumanize migration processes. Thus, we understand that UNICEF redirects the conversation to itself while seeking to engage the audience with the testimonies of refugee children. Hence, this campaign reiterates the violence and oppression through the collection, selection, and publication of these testimonies as much as when it guides the audience.

To sum up, we argue that the humanization and dehumanization of migrant populations, framed as strangers, occur through an ambiguous image and face of the refugee. When portrayed as victims and depoliticized beings, migrant children like Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine require the protection provided by UNICEF because their humanity is recognized and legitimized through the circulation of images that evoke the idea of ​​innocence and passivity (Huysman 2006; Mégred 2006; Dauphinée 2007; Malkki 2015). The campaign used Syrian refugee children’s testimonies as a way to raise funds but also as a way to raise awareness among an adult audience to help the strangers who are and remain at our doors, at our borders (Balibar 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2009; Bauman 2016). As Campbell (1999, 141) pointed out in defense of humanity, an anti-humanist practice occurs in humanitarian discourses: “[the] modern antihumanism (. . .) is true over and beyond the reasons it gives itself’ because humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human.” As a result, violence prevails amid humanization and dehumanization discourses.

Horror, Drama, and Compassion: The Humanitarian Spectacle in Syrian Refugee Children’s Stories

In this section, we highlight spectacularization as one of the most significant visual resources used by advertisement campaigns focused on humanitarianism, refugees/migration, and childhood agendas. We understand spectacularization as a process of unification of social relations through the mediatization of images. The main analytical proposals of this concept in Western philosophy come from Marxist, critical theory, and post-structuralist perspectives. Within Marxism, Guy Debord (2002, 1) states that “[t]he spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.” For spectacularization to gain space and legitimacy with an audience, advertisements use symbolic-cultural instruments based on fetishism. Following Debord (2002, 6), fetishism is linked to merchandise, manifested through an arbitrary selection of images that intend to produce and reiterate systems of domination, control, and subordination. For that reason, the spectacle is a tool of media culture that builds pacification and depoliticization.

For Jappe (2018, 43), Debord discusses spectacle and fetishization to demonstrate how the spectacle acts as a more highly developed form of a society based on the production and its corollary, the fetishism of commodities. Therefore, reflecting on the concept of “fetishism” implies the nature of value and its need to increase human life continually. As a result, the abstract labor embodied in commodities is indifferent to any effects it may have on the plane of use. Jappe (2018, 1–2) understands that Debord’s society of the spectacle aims to problematize mass media’s invasion of everyday life, criticizing the effects of being stuck in front of the television on children. Likewise, Debord denounces how reporting tragic events, such as wars and catastrophes, universally explores the “spectacularization” of information:

[T]he spectacle is thus not a pure and simple adjunct to the world, as propaganda broadcast via the communications media might be said to be. Rather, it is the entirety of social activity that is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends. From city planning to political parties of every tendency, from art to science, from everyday life to human passions and desires, everywhere we find reality replaced by images. In the process, images end up by becoming real, and reality ends up transformed into images (Jappe 2018, 7).

While Debord proposes a generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, Douglas Kellner (2002) presents a set of specific examples of contemporary media spectacles, demonstrating how they are produced in the digital age. Following Arjun Appadurai (1996), Kellner (2002, 94) states that socio-political actors experience a new stage of spectacle dominated by the mediascape. More and more domains of everyday life bring a proliferating wave of information and images into the home through the Internet, competing with television as the dominant communication medium. Hence, the author compares spectacles broadcast in the media as phenomena that embody society’s morals, introducing norms and dramatizing debates, struggles, and conflict resolution mechanisms (Kellner 2002, 2):

The fetishism of one identity marker to the exclusion of others, we should be aware that identity is multiple, flexible, and overdetermined, that oppression takes place on many dimensions, and that an oppositional political identity requires solidarity and alliance with other subjugated groups against common oppressors and institutions and practices that produce inequality and injustice (Kellner 2002, 113).

When reflecting on the concept of spectacle, we seek to establish a bridge between Debord and Barthes, although we recognize their different onto-epistemologies. By recovering Kellner’s work, we aim to highlight the Marxist implications of the concept of spectacle, emphasizing its economic-political elements given the unequal dynamics of political subjects when they access and consume media content as alienated subjects. For Kellner (2002, 3), the spectacle is a “permanent opium war” that stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life. Nevertheless, like Kellner (2002, 28), we do not wish to reduce our analyses of the spectacle in the Unfairy Tales to a deterministic economic-political perspective. Therefore, we emphasize Barthes’ semiological discussions through Kellner to underscore the ideological aspects the spectacle can mobilize. As such, we suggest that these ideological elements and Western worldviews nourish the spectacle. As we aim to explore in this section, the spectacle works through the naturalization of bourgeois values ​​in synergy with colonialism, especially when it silences and/or ignores the violence not only against the colonized population but also against those who watch it. Contrary to Debord (2002, 5–6), who understands the spectator as merely alienated and whose political emancipation is impossible, we follow Barthes through Kellner (2002, 28) to analyze media figures and rhetorical strategies to produce critical consciousness in the spectator and our readers.

Regarding semiology in the humanitarian discourse, Lilie Chouliaraki (2006, 2010) complements this discussion by highlighting that fetishism acts within the scope of the spectacle as a symbolic condition to delimit identity/differences. The Unfairy Tales manifest this binary when the stories of Syrian refugee children are humanized and dehumanized based on their testimonies. For her, fetishism operates within the scope of the production and circulation of images through certain frames, aesthetics, and symbols that aim to expand and amplify the publicized “fact” through visuals that connote and denote representations based on violence, fear, oppression, and compassion. In this context, the viewer should be seen as a voyeur since they produce and watch the media content, actively and passively feeling pleasure and pain (Chouliaraki 2006, 136).

De Genova (2013) expands the discussion of fetishism in humanitarian discourse through the concept of Border Spectacle. For the author, spectacles on the border reproduce scenes of exclusion and inclusion concerning migration policing and law in the Global North. They do so by producing discourses and images of “illegality” that include migrants in the socio-political discussion by excluding them from participation in these conversations (de Genova 2013, 1181). Fetichizing this illegality, the author underscores how migrants’ images reinforce their vulnerabilities as individual matters, withdrawing the responsibility of helping and caring, therefore, protecting these migrants’ rights from the states that receive them (de Genova 2013, 1189). In other words, “the Border Spectacle is also a spectacle of the state’s dutiful, diligent, more or less energetic, but ever-beleaguered ‘response’ to the fetishized image of a ‘crisis’ of border ‘invasion’ or ‘inundation’” (de Genova 2013, 1190–1).

In UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales, we suggest that the videos mobilize spectacle through images characterized by three elements: horror, drama, and compassion. First, horror operates through sensations of disgust, repulsion, and aversion. Semiotically, it informs a state of despair as viewers engage with the campaign. Horror works through images that use intense warm tones, frames that explore monstrous figures, and the dread when faced with the impossibility of finding a solution or a way out. For instance, the depicted Syrian refugee children have lived under a constant condition of threat/risk, given the inhumane conditions they experience in their search for safety and survival. Many do not make it as violent environmental and socio-political conditions brutalize their bodies and minds, and they are left adrift in the deserts and seas that become open-air cemeteries. In the UNICEF animations, the stories of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine depict horror in various ways. In “Malak and the Boat,” the appearance of sea monsters and the disfigurement of the other travelers on the boat who later die manifest the horror in the story (UNICEF 2016b). “Mustafa goes for a walk” portrays horror when his family members disappear, turning into smoke, and the house begins to crack due to the air strikes (UNICEF 2016c). Finally, “Ivine and Pillow” showcases horror when Ivine hides under a table during the bombings and encounters the scenes of violence: her destroyed city, the pools of blood that reflect her image, and the nightmares in which the missiles chase her (UNICEF 2016d).

Second, drama is a staged act to draw attention through images and dialogues characterized by conflicts and tensions. UNICEF exerts drama through sound design that conveys suspense, tension, and climax. As UNICEF’s Chief of Communication, Paloma Escudero (2017, emphasis added) states, “The stories of the three children are not unusual. At least 65 million children and young people globally are on the move—escaping conflict, poverty, and extreme weather—looking for a more stable life and a place to call home.” Therefore, increasing the suspense in the storytelling was paramount. Drama materializes when Malak leans over a boat with other migrants, which later overturns, and the camera shifts to an underground point of view to simulate drowning. She cries profusely when she finds herself alone, helpless, and unsafe (UNICEF 2016b). As for Mustafa, the drama appears, for example, when he climbs a steep mountain and has to abandon his toys due to the difficulty in carrying them, a scene that uses multiple shots to emphasize how painful this moment is for him. Moreover, Mustafa sees the refugee camp on the horizon from a downward point of view similar to a hero facing the next challenge. His fight for survival is relentless as he walks searching for care and protection (UNICEF 2016c). Concerning Ivine’s story, the drama operates in the missiles dropping from the sky, the odyssey representing the migratory process (i.e., going through the sea, desert, and mountain), and the nightmares about the missiles pursuing her while Pillow offers protection (UNICEF 2016d).

As the third element of spectacularization, compassion mobilizes a feeling of pity and solidarity when facing tragedy. In humanitarian advertisements, compassion describes and emphasizes the emotional state of anguish an individual experiences when it is possible to mitigate it. Accompanied by the horror and drama, compassion amplifies the spectator’s emotional relationship with the advertisements. Generally, compassion appears in the three stories through downcast looks and faces with expressions of sadness and pain (UNICEF 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). These elements make up the stories of the survivors based on their humanized and dehumanized testimonies. According to the Creative Director of the campaign, Alex Danklof (2017), “the idea was to make the user part of the story. (. . .) The user makes difficult choices like Mustafa had to do and takes the viewer from a passive audience member to an active member.”

Based on these three elements, we understand that the show creates a specific representation of Syrian refugee children. While the animations narrate their journeys fleeing the conflict, demonstrating some agency, generally, they remain passive to their context. We note that the images of Syrian refugee children mobilized in the campaign frame them as innocent and defenseless—passive beings—who must be protected by their legal guardians. In their absence, it is up to international organizations to help and safeguard Syrian refugee children so that they can find their guardians or different forms of shelter that guarantee some form of protection. The legal responsibility that UNICEF attributes to itself reflects the paternalism that the institution exercises over the children’s passivity, represented by their obedience and subservience not only to adults but also to institutions in the Global North (Bhabha 2015; Huynh, D'Costa, and Lee-Koo 2015; Tabak and Carvalho 2018; De Castro 2020; Rabello de Castro 2020).

We suggest that UNICEF’s advertising campaign reiterates a certain conception of children’s role in politics, especially when contrasted with armed conflicts and migration flows. Based on a romantic and modern vision, this idea follows a Western model of childhood, whose “origin” comes from the industrialization process that began in the nineteenth century (Burman 1994; Stephens 1995). Since then, this universal(ized) model of childhood promoted by the Global North has acted as a commodity by connoting and denoting racialized and gendered images of innocence, health, and beauty. As an iteration, institutions such as UNICEF ratify a depoliticized and, above all, passive vision of childhood, maintaining socio-political hierarchies, inequalities, and paternalism between children and adults (Cunningham 2005; Watson 2006). Simplified and homogenized, UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales project archetypes of the Western childhood model as they suggest a sense of universal humanity, exalting, and disregarding the individualities of Syrian refugee children only as objects and not political subjects (Rajaram 2002; Malkki 2015; Bhabha 2015; De Castro 2020; Martuscelli 2023).

Accordingly, mobilizing fairy tale styles of storytelling is no coincidence. In fairy tales, characters act within a narrative structure that imagines an introduction, development, climax, and outcome. When they play the role of protagonists, their actions in the story operate ambiguously. On the one hand, these characters are proactive, exercising autonomy to solve problems, controlling their trajectory, and narrating their story. On the other hand, the characters hold a certain passivity by maintaining a responsive posture to the plot and other characters. As a victim, the protagonist remains a prisoner to external interventions responsible for containing them. Usually, the spectator’s satisfaction comes from accompanying the protagonist in their journey from a victim of the circumstances to a socio-political actor in their context (Zipes 1975; Todorov 1992; França 2023).

We understand that child-character’s ambiguity in the fairy tale storytelling in the UNICEF campaign reinforces the Western model of childhood. Obviously, the Unfairy Tales frames the child-character as a victim, associating them with a passive, amorphous, and depoliticized being. Their childhood is compromised; therefore, they are vulnerable and remain at constant risk. To return to “normality,” seen as acceptable and justifiable, UNICEF promotes a sociocultural mediation that humanizes and dehumanizes the child-characters’ stories and trajectories through the spectacularization and fetishization of drama, compassion, and horror. Obtusely, this storytelling technique uses the child as an object that serves the economic and political maintenance of the international institution that does not tell the story but mediates the production of content and controls its dissemination. As objects, children have their stories and trajectories represented through an “act of humanity.” Their facial expressions and testimonies can mobilize the attention of the altruistic and salvationist spectator who can be responsible for the children, guaranteeing protection and care. By engaging passively and/or actively with these campaigns, the spectator maintains the logic of dependence and subordination toward children, ratifying the paternalism of international institutions that sustain hierarchical and unequal relations between populations in the North and the Global South (Nadel 1997; Dorfman and Mattelart 2020). That way, the ambiguous (obvious and obtuse) use of fairy tales in the campaign aims to create resonance with the audience to produce lessons and stimulate morally coded behaviors and donations.

As we aim to show in this section, UNICEF’s institutional action becomes even more compelling and convincing when it shows visuals of horror, pain, and compassion. By participating in and consuming media content produced by UNICEF, the audience reinforces the homogeneous and essentializing representations of Syrian refugee children. In turn, that authorizes global emergency management systems related to refugee issues as international institutions, such as UNICEF, act as a form of warning and containment of human suffering. Therefore, we underscore the importance of analyzing and reflecting on the workings of humanitarian spectacles as they capture a series of testimonies to portray harshness, cruelty, and violence.

Concluding Remarks

This article reflected upon UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales as humanitarian advertisements about Syrian refugee children. Through a semiotic analysis, we argued that this advertising campaign humanizes, dehumanizes, and spectacularizes the narratives of forced migration told by the children-characters. In doing so, we engaged critically with humanitarian advertisements, promoted an interdisciplinary debate on semiotics, and put different bodies of literature in dialogue.

We developed our semiotic approach by discussing techniques in sequential art, which seeks to produce content based on a sequence of images to tell a story through its graphic elements. In this model, a series of previously selected, programmed, and targeted messages guide the viewer’s engagement with the advertising pieces. As such, we highlighted the importance of understanding the relationship between the videos’ obvious and obtuse components. In addition, we underscored how digital media impacts how these humanitarian advertisements have stimulated audiences to engage with the cause. The campaign’s sophisticated approach transformed the way it handled the testimonies of Malak, Mustafa, and Ivine as it leveraged the spectator’s attention and emotions through fairy tale storytelling to create a compelling narrative and promote donations.

By collecting and disseminating testimonies from Syrian refugee children, UNICEF’s campaign produced ambiguous content that humanizes and dehumanizes their faces and trajectories. We identified aesthetic humanization when the Unfairy Tales videos framed Syrian children as victims, that is, defenseless and innocent beings who needed protection and care. This humanization endorses political awareness of the armed conflict in Syria, enumerating different forms of violence these children have faced in the migration processes. Regarding dehumanization, Syrian refugee children have had their agencies depoliticized since UNICEF’s mediation guides one specific narrative—one that stimulates the viewer to donate—and, consequently, contains any form of political contestation considered as resistance. When they appear in the videos as real people, Syrian refugee children have their speeches reduced to a brief statement. In extracting their testimonies, the videos reduce these children to their moving and tragic faces to essentialize and homogenize their lives. That allows UNICEF and other international institutions to exploit human pain through the dehumanization of the Syrian population to raise funds for their operations, which discursively aim to address these issues.

Finally, we highlighted the spectacularization of images in humanitarian advertisements to attract an audience. The spectacle in UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales comes from using terrifying and compelling visuals based on human suffering to scandalize the public. Hence, fetishism operates in the videos by stimulating contradictory feelings of pleasure and pain in the viewer. Based on a discursive regime of universal childhood led by the Global North, the campaign portrays Syrian refugee children as amorphous and depoliticized, who must receive constant care and attention. By being framed this way, the audience learns that their childhood must be protected, and these children must receive care from their families. In their absence, however, it is up to states and/or international organizations to guarantee shelter when children experience a state of war or migratory flow, that is, when their lives are at constant risk/threat. In this context, representatives of institutions in the North mobilize a paternalistic vision, resorting to visuals that endorse the vulnerabilities, insecurities, and dependencies of children in the Global South.

Acknowledgments

This article’s first version was discussed during the 2019 International Political Sociology Winter School in Rio de Janeiro. We would like to thank Jef Huysmans, Martina Tazzioli, Carolina Moulin, Cristina Rojas, Francine Rossone, Jana Tabak, João Nogueira, Roberto Yamato, Marcos Araújo, and Octávio Aragão, for their engagement with previous versions of this article. Additionally, we appreciate the insights from the editorial team and the anonymous reviewers.

Funder Information

This article was written when Pablo Fontes was conducting a postdoctoral fellowship in International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. For that reason, this work was supported by the Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [E_17/2022].

Footnotes

References