Short Abstract

This workshop invites contributions focusing on the breakdown of humanitarianism, for example in the context of migration and border regimes, and on resistance to such policies.

Long Abstract

We are hearing reports from the US, where ICE officers are chasing and brutally deporting undocumented migrants; we are learning of deportation flights from Europe to Afghanistan; and we are seeing images of people in Ceuta who have crossed the militarised border into Europe, only to be left there by the thousands without basic provisions and forced to return. These images reveal the escalating violence against people seeking protection or a life worth living, and they expose a policy based on externalization, deterrence, and deportation that is part of the global swing to the right. Humanitarian organisations and solidarity networks – which have repeatedly been criticised in anthropology for the risk of (re-)producing inequality – are financially drained by anti-migration policies, whilst committed supporters and solidarity movements are being criminalised. At the same time, the language of humanitarian aid is being hijacked: 'humanitarian corridors' were used to facilitate deportations from Nagorno-Karabakh, 'humanitarian zones' in the Gaza Strip became deadly traps, and humanitarian facilities at the borders enable state-sanctioned military violence.

Bringing together perspectives on affect, materiality, and politics, we ask: What moves anthropologists in this context? We invite contributions that trace the discursive, infrastructural, and embodied dimensions of this transformation: How is humanitarian language redeployed to manage and justify exclusion? How can surveillance technologies and humanitarian infrastructures become disentangled? What forms of resistance and solidarity persist despite criminalization?

We welcome ethnographic and conceptual contributions that address anti-immigration and border policy also from activist perspectives in this moment of humanitarian breakdown.