In the following paper, we focus on the metaphors used in selected texts from two daily newspapers: the Croatian Vecernji list and the Slovenian Slovenske novice. We try to elaborate on the research question: How important are the repeated metaphorical patterns in texts concerning refugees in the Croatian and Slovenian cases? We focus on the metaphors used in articles that are available in digital form, published in October 2015 and February 2016. Our interest is to show how the use of certain metaphors in both newspapers helped construct the social ‘reality’ during the ‘refugee’ crisis. The emphasis is on the metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 2015) as a discursive phenomenon (Fairclough, 1990; Vezovnik, 2009) and not only as a linguistic phenomenon. The reporting of the newspapers mainly concerned the security aspect (Buzan et. al., 1998; Huysmans, 2000; 2006; Ibrahim, 2005), while the humanitarian aspect was difficult to detect. The discourse in the texts was dominated by the security discourse. The use of metaphors, which we analyzed in the empirical part of the paper, helps in the formation of this type of discourse.
