Im/mobility and humanitarian triage

In this chapter the authors examines the interrelationship between im/mobility and humanitarian triage. Humanitarian interventions in border spaces have increased as the world’s borders become more exclusive and violent and these interventions are undertaken by a range of actors from border police, coast guards and state militaries and non-state humanitarian actors. This humanitarian borderwork not only has an intimate relationship to the border but also to im/mobility and it is this relationship that is the focus of this chapter. In shifting the gaze from borders to im/mobility, scholarship on humanitarian work in border settings can more comprehensively grasp the challenges humanitarian actors face and the new ways of working they produce. The chapter uncovers humanitarianism’s uncomfortable relationship with mobility, dominant rationalities of intervention and the ethics of care. But more than this, it asks humanitarianism in practice to re-examine its relationship with the political structures that produce differentiated and risky regimes of mobility.