Humanitarian action at Europe’s borders

This article examines the ambivalent role of professional humanitarian action at Europe’s borders, particularly along the EU’s southern Mediterranean border. It argues that recent developments associated with the European Pact on Migration and Asylum mark a qualitative shift in the governance of humanitarian action. Humanitarian organisations have become embedded within border regimes while simultaneously facing academic and normative critique, instrumentalisation and criminalisation, and growing constraints on humanitarian autonomy. Situating these developments within a governance environment structured by crisis, emergency and exception, the article traces the expansion, ambivalences and contestation of humanitarian practices at European borders. It argues that processes of instrumentalisation and criminalisation increasingly culminate in forms of regulated incorporation that I conceptualize as domestication. Domestication exposes the limits of humanitarian neutrality where humanitarian need is produced by deliberate policy choices, placing humanitarian actors in the position of providing care-based intervention and the defense of migrants’ rights.