Data analysis

Data mining/collection was followed by data analysis. The analysis was beyond a mere word count in examining the nature of rhetorical persuasion contained. The fundamental purpose was to bring out how rhetorical action was a persuasion strategy in the EU migration policy change. I captured the generic styles of speech in all the relevant video clips. I incorporated time and space in the rhetorical analysis to examine the act of persuasion – the speakers’

attempt to reorient audiences to a particular situation. A speaker could speak at different times to convey different but related arguments. Also, a speaker could repeat an argument several times in different places. Because of this reason, the main analytical task was the examination of the reflection of speech in particular situations, audiences, and purposes.

To maintain consistency of analysis based on the thematic areas, the researcher must be willing to compromise by dropping and connecting parts of information (Krippendorff, 2018). First, I ensured that thematic content analysis preserved the originality of textual interpretation. I maintained this by clarifying the target audiences to remain sensible in achieving the research objective. This categorization was done to all forms of rhetorical artifacts used in the study.

The data that fell far from the scope was dropped and not included in the study.

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I began the analysis by scanning through each classified video clip from the beginning to the end. Then I carefully reread all transcripts, highlighting the critical use of ethos, pathos and logos in a speech or text. Keywords and phrases that captured these key features in every video transcript were highlighted and categorized accordingly. I then established a smooth connection between rhetoric. At this stage, some texts and speech transcripts were split into subcategories, while others were combined. Even after splitting and combining arguments, I revisited the data that did not directly fit into the primary categorization but was still relevant and analyzed it distinctively. Lastly, all the categories were organized into a hierarchical structure according to the thematic rhetorical action areas.

The study used the three primary interpretation approaches: the literal approach, an interpretive approach and a reflexive approach. The literal approach mainly focuses on the exact use of a particular language and semantics. The interpretive approach is concerned with making sense or constructing participants’ accounts. In other words, the interpretive approach involves interpolating meanings. In a reflexive approach, the researcher gets more engaged in reflecting a speaker's intention by conducting a situational analysis (Heracleous and Barrett, 2001; Hsiu-Fang and Shannon, 2005; Welsh, 2002). Depending on the necessity, I deployed all three approaches in conducting a rhetorical analysis – analyzing the characteristics of a language as a persuasion tool. The concurrent use of literal, interpretive and reflexive forms of analysis enabled the integration of the content and context of speech and text to examine the subjectiveness of rhetoric.

Another significant task in video analysis was the re-figuration of the context to bring out the persuasiveness of rhetoric. I examined whether speakers spoke only about the prevailing situation of migration, i.e., framing irregular migration as a crisis, or linked the current EU-Africa relations to coloniality. At this level, it was possible to observe how each partner sought to shape their circumstances through rhetoric so that their point of view would appear

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appropriate to their opponent. Another analytical task was examining rhetorical entrapment - political behavior of when and how the EU felt entrapped. For this task, I categorized my analysis relative to the thematic areas of rhetorical action (such as the rhetoric of colonialism, neo-colonialism by African partner countries) and the European partners' rhetorical entrapment.

In both rhetorical action and rhetorical entrapment, I focused on the nature of rhetoric, i.e., whether rhetoric was an action or a reaction. Such an analysis brought out the subjectivity of rhetoric. However, a single expression could have an objective or/and subjective rhetoric.

Objective statements express factual information, while subjective statements express subjective views. However, at times, the sentence-level analysis failed to precisely capture the speakers’ attitude towards the direction of migration management. As an alternative, the analysis involved the clauses and contexts of the speech. I used feature-level analysis by concentrating on the features of rhetoric. The feature-level analysis is an aspect-based rhetoric summarization (Liu, 2012:11). Rather than examining the construction of the language in use through the analysis of sentences or clauses and phrases, the feature-level analysis is concerned with the overall opinion. A feature-level study is founded on the assumption that an opinion consists of rhetoric and a target audience; hence an opinion without a target did not have any use and was thus not considered as rhetoric. The ability to capture the targets of the opinions enabled a proper understanding of the purpose of rhetoric. In a nutshell, the feature-level analysis enabled the production of a structured summary of arguments about the subject of the study. Under every theme, I checked if data was enough to construct strong rhetoric, generalizable and supportive of the larger context of the rhetorical action.

One form of analysis is data extrapolation. Extrapolation involves inferences of unobserved rhetorical instances in the periods between or beyond the observed data points (Krippendorff,

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2018: 47-8). Rhetorical action is presumed to analyze a general case of a policy change system featured by complex variables, e.g., rhetorical action, rhetorical reaction and policy change.

For instance, I examined the entire policy influence system - how African partner countries framed the root causes of irregular migration and how a rhetorical entrapment by the European partners occurred. Some components of the system (rhetorical action and entrapment) were not readily available. Thus, I used extrapolations to manage the situation. Some extrapolation involved establishing a relationship based on time, while others were based on the content.

Content inferences addressed the limitation of the unavailability of some arguments presented by both African and European partners, especially during the 2015 Valletta summit. The established analytical constructs ensured that rhetoric was processed in line with what they purposed to achieve.

Lastly, I analyzed how the rhetoric of addressing the root causes of African irregular migration was incorporated in the EU's wider policy discussions. Although the central space of rhetoric was the EU parliament, I also engaged the rhetorical evidence from political discussions across Europe.