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Miriam Ticktin
Thinking Beyond
Humanitarian Borders

the language of humanitarianism has played a central role in

political and media debates about undocumented migrants/refugees
crossing into Europe and North America. The unaccompanied minors
entering the United States reached the designation of “humanitar-
ian crisis” in the summer of 2014, whereas the tipping point in the
Mediterranean came in April 2015, when at least five boats sank and
close to 1,200 people drowned en route to Europe.
In response to the drownings of 700 people traveling from
Libya to Lampedusa, European Union  Foreign Policy Commissioner
Federica Mogherini stated that “The  EU  was created on the idea of
the protection of human rights, human dignity and human life. We
have to be consistent with that idea” (Lyman 2015). The European
Commission said that it wanted to adopt “immediate measures to
prevent human tragedies and to deal with emergencies” (EU Press
Release, 27 May 2015). It proposed a plan to reduce the loss of lives
through joint search-and-rescue strategies. And in September 2015,
the New York Times reported that the refugee crisis had “set right-wing
nationalist and populist politicians against Pan-European humanitar-
ians, who have portrayed the crisis in stark moral terms” (Erlanger
and Cantor 2015). In other words, it seems the only subject position
available to those who are not trying to build fences or walls is “hu-
manitarian.” To be sure, there have been a host of humanitarian non-
governmental organizations (NGOs)—ranging from the large, famous
ones such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doc-
tors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) to many other local

social research Vol. 83 : No. 2 : Summer 2016 255

incarnations—working for years at various entry points into Europe,
such as the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla as well as the Italian
island of Lampedusa.
Similarly, in the United States, politicians, the media, and hu-
man rights organizations called the arrival of undocumented chil-
dren in the summer of 2014 a “humanitarian crisis” and an “urgent
humanitarian situation”; President Barack Obama initially responded
by suggesting that, in addition to creating the conditions for Hondu-
ran children to apply for asylum from Honduras, he would consider
them for “humanitarian parole,” which means temporary admission
due to a compelling emergency (Robles and Sheer 2014). Even though
humanitarianism was supposed to signal compassion for children
who were fleeing unimaginable violence, Republicans and immigra-
tion opponents criticized Obama for using this language and being
too soft, supposedly encouraging an opening of the floodgates.
But humanitarianism is far from soft; indeed, it can often end
up hurting those it intends to help. I will discuss a number of rea-
sons why humanitarianism at the border is not good enough, and
can produce more harm than good; my underlying goal, however, is
to make space for new affective and political grammars in response
to suffering, injustice and death. That is, while humanitarianism is
often understood as driven by emotions—compassion, empathy, be-
nevolence, pity—in fact, it relies on a very narrow emotional constel-
lation, and this in turn constrains our responses. Humanitarianism
provides little room to feel and recognize the value of particular lives
(versus life in general), or to mourn particular deaths (versus suffer-
ing in general); and little impetus to animate political change.
If we want to change the situation at the borders of Europe
and the United States, we need another form of political care, one
that reaches beyond care as welfare in nation-states, and beyond
the benevolence of humanitarianism. My analysis draws on recent
events, but it is also informed by my earlier ethnographic research
on the ways that humanitarianism works to govern undocumented
migrants and refugees in France and the United States, often with

256   social research

harmful consequences— a process I have called “armed love” (Ticktin
2011a, 2011b, 2008).

THE PROBLEM WITH INNOCENCE

The first problem with humanitarian borders is that humanitarianism
sets up a distinction between innocence and guilt, leaving no space
for the experiences of life. The quintessential humanitarian victims
bear no responsibility for their suffering. Their innocence is what
qualifies them for humanitarian compassion. As innocents, they are
pure, without guile, and without intent—they are seemingly outside
politics and certainly outside blame for their misfortune. Yet who are
these perfect victims?
Interestingly, children are usually the face of humanitarian-
ism; they are represented as innocent victims of famine, war, or natu-
ral disaster. We need only look at the introductory images on the
websites of organizations such as the International Rescue Commit-
tee or Oxfam.1 And yet the migrant children who were at the heart
of the 2014 crisis in the United States were not afforded the status of
victims, worthy of humanitarian aid. Why? They seem to have been
contaminated by an association not only with the gangs and violence
of the drug trade that they are fleeing, but also with other undoc-
umented immigrants, who are cast as criminal by virtue of having
crossed a border in search of a better life or to reunite with their
families. The melding of immigrant detention centers with prisons—
increasingly owned and run by the same companies, such as the GEO
Group—is both cause and manifestation of this criminalization. Now
which of these children will pass the test of innocence? Which will
qualify for humanitarian parole when innocence is what is required?
The journeys north that many have endured, often filled with horrific
tales of violence and exploitation, would cause anyone to lose their
innocence—if innocence is something anyone can possess, when it
requires a sort of freedom from desire, will, or agency. If humanitari-
anism is the primary language used to counter closed-border and anti-
immigrant policies, the majority of migrants—children included—
will be sent to detention centers or deported without due process.

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   257

 A similar search for innocence is apparent in the European case.
The already iconic image of little Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy
whose body washed up onto a Turkish beach in September 2015, is a
perfect example. It grabbed the world’s attention, eliciting sympathy
rather than the usual mix of fear and indifference for those who have
left their homes to land upon European shores. The photo gave the
“migrant crisis” a new face: innocence. It shamed Europe into action.
But even before that, innocence was at play: Italian President
Giorgio Napolitano called the drownings off the coast of Lampedusa
in October 2013 a “slaughter of innocents” (Davies 2013). This begs
the questions of who committed the “slaughter”; that is, this focus
on innocence and vulnerability immediately invokes a simultaneous
slot for—and criminalization of—the guilty. In this sense, humani-
tarianism is inevitably accompanied by practices of policing; compas-
sion comes with repression (Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2005, 2011a). In the
European case, the traffickers have been designated the guilty party.
While traffickers may indeed be part of criminal gangs, they may also
be family members, friends, or part of migrant communities, in simi-
lar situations to those of the migrants themselves; indeed, migrants
must solicit help to cross—it is not a simple situation of the innocent
being preyed upon by the guilty. Indeed, it is effectively impossible
to enter the global north to make a claim for asylum now without
a smuggler’s help (Hathaway 2008), but this is primarily the conse-
quence of the varied militarized security apparatuses put into effect
by states. It is not driven by the collusion of traffickers. This focus
on traffickers, rather than helping the innocent, furthers the crimi-
nalization and securitization of borders, which in turn leads to more
deaths—all the while exempting states from responsibility.
Likewise, since April 2015, both the media and public officials
in Europe have insisted on the distinction between “refugees” and
“illegal economic migrants.” Although asylum is a legal category that
we may want to protect, the way it is being used here is primarily a
moral, not a legal, distinction that purports to separate the innocent
from the guilty, the deserving from the undeserving. “Real” refugees

258   social research

are seen as innocent—fleeing real, and well-founded fears of persecu-
tion. As anthropologist Liisa Malkki argued in 1996, refugees, espe-
cially African refugees, are figured as “a ‘sea’ or ‘blur of humanity’”—
as “a spectacle of a ‘raw,’ ‘bare humanity’” (Malkki 1996, 387). They
are understood as passive and in need of saving: unfortunately, Alan’s
lifeless body exemplifies these features. Economic migrants, by con-
trast, are counterposed against refugees and portrayed as wily, trying
to lie their way into the welfare and other benefits found in Europe
and to undermine European security as well as European values. In
other words, humanitarianism requires innocent sufferers to be rep-
resented in the passivity of their suffering, not in the action they take
to confront and escape it (Boltanski 1999).
Ultimately, innocence works as part of a binary: guilt is its nec-
essary other, and the pendulum can swing quickly between the two.
Nothing could show this more clearly than the reactions to the hor-
rific November 13, 2015, Islamic State (ISIL) terror attacks in Paris.
France immediately closed its borders, establishing a state of emer-
gency that suspended Schengen rules (which allow passport-free
movement within most of Europe) in a bait and switch that rendered
refugees guilty for the attacks; the United States and much of Europe
followed suit. From innocent to guilty in the blink of an eye.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s statement in November
is also illustrative of this binary frame: he used the photo of Alan’s
body to counter then-Republican presidential candidate Chris Chris-
tie’s suggestion that the United States should not even admit refugee
orphans under five years old. Holding up the photo, de Blasio stated,
“This is the cost of not bringing in people who are innocent victims
of a humanitarian crisis” (Jorgensen 2015). Either innocent or guilty:
there is nothing in between. This frame careens between identifying
with the victim to making her/him into a distant and barbaric Other.
Where is the room for those who are neither innocent nor guilty,
neither victims nor heroes? In this schema, there is no way to recog-
nize them, no law or language by which to give them space to live or
die regular or mundane lives.

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   259

 While the focus on helping and saving innocent refugees may
appear generous and humane, even without acknowledging its rela-
tionship to guilt, it is worth noting that it actually functions to limit
the number of people admitted into Europe; as philosopher Han-
nah Arendt already acknowledged in 1951, asylum as a category was
always only meant for the exceptional cases, never for the masses
(Arendt 1951, 291). Indeed, as just one example, according to EU Eu-
rostats, Spain granted asylum to a total of 15 people in 2014.2
To be sure, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom respond-
ed to the photo of Alan by increasing the numbers of refugees they
were willing to accept—with Germany taking the lead, at 800,000
people per year for the next few years—although that too has now
come into question (Smith and Tran 2015; Foster et al. 2015). But
those claiming asylum must still go through rigorous application pro-
cedures; someone must judge if they are worthy. As we know, the
Canadian government had already denied legal status to Alan and his
family: it is not clear that he would have been saved by the policies
being proposed in response to his death. In fact, since these measures
were declared, the constraints on asylum applications have become
more and more apparent: Germany has said it will process asylum
applications more quickly, not in order to help, but to deport those
who do not qualify in record speed (Lennard and Hermsmeier 2015).
Innocence is about purity, vulnerability, and naiveté; and it
carries the desire to protect and take responsibility for those who—in
their want of knowledge—cannot take care of themselves. Children
and puppies come to mind first. Innocence establishes a hierarchical
relationship: those who care and those who are cared for.
Of course, care is welcome; but what does it mean to be wel-
comed as a victim, passive, and unable to take care of oneself ? In
the face of such images, will these migrants be able to get a job once
they are up and on their feet again? Will they be trusted as smart,
capable, responsible?
Innocence structures our relationships to make some of us sav-
iors and others victims. Indeed, the process of saving innocent vic-

260   social research

tims often promises absolution to the saviors. It leaves little room to
think that we might also be responsible for these migrants’ plight
(by helping to create the conditions that they are fleeing, from war
and poverty to climate change)—that we might actually owe them
hospitality and welcome. It leaves no room, indeed, to think that we
might be equals.
Perversely, innocence is clearest in death; Alan exemplified the
pure innocence of refugees only after he was washed up on Turk-
ish shores. He was pure in his passivity, his lack—innocence is about
lack, after all. As the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, innocence
is about the want of knowledge or sense, the want of experience,
the lack of guile or corruption. There are many “Alans”—two- and
three-year-olds—attempting to cross borders every day, and they are
not treated as innocent. When one cannot establish innocence, one
joins the cavernous ranks of the guilty, and guilt, it seems, removes
the value from one’s life or death. When one is guilty, there is little
available language to speak of injustice, hardship, or death. Moral
judgment has already been passed—one has brought on one’s own
misfortune. Indeed, Kaneti and Assis (this issue) demonstrate the pro-
cess by which border-crossing deaths are blamed on migrants and
their families; they are framed as responsible for making risky and
dangerous choices (that is, crossing the desert), while the state repre-
sents itself as humanitarian by simply helping to bury the bodies af-
ter the fact. In this kind of politics, there is no space to miss or lament
those who were not designated “innocent victims”; their lives do not
count. Their deaths do not count. In Judith Butler’s terms, their lives
are rendered ungrievable (Butler 2009).
As such, humanitarianism may serve not only as a cover for
removing rights from the many in the name of the few (Ticktin
2011a), but also for withholding the acknowledgment of life and loss.
Innocence should not be a criterion that separates out those who live
and die, or how they live and die. In this sense, humanitarianism—
rather than protect humanity as a whole—establishes hierarchies of
humanity (Fassin 2010). By this account some of us are more human

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   261

than others; and only some lives worth recognizing, and only some
deaths worth mourning.

THE PROBLEM WITH EMERGENCY

The second problem is that humanitarianism addresses only the pres-
ent: we have humanitarian “crises” or “emergencies,” which require
immediate action. With this temporal perspective, there is no way
to understand events in a larger historical context, no time to think
of the past or plan for the future: humanitarianism frames events
as sudden and unpredictable. To be sure, there are such situations,
such as the recent 2015 earthquake in Nepal, hurricane “Sandy” in
the United States in 2012, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the Indian
Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004. All of these precisely fit the
definition of “humanitarian crisis.” Yet talking about any situation as
a humanitarian emergency makes it seem as if it is an exception to
an otherwise peaceful order. There is no space to understand causes
or histories that might have led to or shaped this moment. There was
a significant increase in the number of children crossing the border
into the United States in 2014, but their journeys were not sudden or
unpredictable; unaccompanied children have been coming in greater
numbers at least since 2009, fleeing situations of increasing violence.
The number in October 2014 was reported at somewhere between
52,000 and 57,000, but in 2013 there were already well more than
25,000 unaccompanied children, and in 2012, there were 13,000.
People have also been crossing from North Africa into Eu-
rope—and dying—for many years now. Before the European Union
was formed and visas were required, people came and went without
fanfare, according to seasonal labor demands. But after the Schengen
accords were signed, such crossings were rendered illegal and they be-
came more dangerous. The first deaths registered were in the Straits
of Gibraltar in the early 1990s. The fences at Ceuta and Melilla date
from the mid-1980s, but in 2005, after a famous rush on the walls, a
third fence was built at Melilla to stop the regular influx of migrants.
We also know that the crossings and many deaths at sea have a his-

262   social research

tory simply by looking at the development of Frontex, the European
border management agency. Why would such technologies, includ-
ing sensors, cameras, cables, drones, and wires, have been developed
if this were a sudden occurrence? And there is still more: since the
1990s, there has been an effort by the European Union in conjunction
with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to
train bordering countries such as Morocco in asylum practices—effec-
tively outsourcing and offshoring asylum—so that they can act as the
police officers of Europe and block the passage of sub-Saharans. This
too belies the idea of emergency.
To even begin to address the problem, we need to apprehend
it beyond the purview of emergency, look to its past—its history and
its causes—and think about how we might forge a different future.
For example, we must devise new strategies to tackle the drug
war, and the insatiable demand coming from the United States, which
fuels this violence, and the accompanying migrations; and the rising
inequality between rich and poor which underlies it all. Similarly,
the “hunger” that draws migrants from Africa to Europe is shaped
not only by war and conflict, but by the histories of structural adjust-
ment programs in Africa layered onto histories of colonialism and
intervention. It is affected by arms sales. And the deaths at the United
States–Mexico border and in the Mediterranean are increased by the
extremely lucrative migrant industry itself, and the profits made by
transnational companies investing in surveillance, detention, and
prison technologies. At best, it is naïve to suggest that the crossings
will be stopped by fences, or the drownings by humanitarians.
But let us also expand the frame to look to the future, and
not simply in hope but in mourning. If we stay in the temporality
of emergency, once again there is no space to mark or experience
the loss of those who have died or suffered en route; no space to
mourn people’s loss of a previous existence, a home, a family, a sense
of belonging. Such losses are an inevitable part of any future born
out of this current context; they haunt every choice and action. In
humanitarian time, one is always reeling from crisis to crisis. The

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   263

“emergency imaginary” (Calhoun 2010) needs constant feeding, and
the world’s attention span lasts as long as it can sustain the immedi-
ate horror of violence or death. There is seemingly no event without
crisis. While donations to charities surged 24 hours after the photo
of Alan was published and created a record month of giving (O’Neil
2015), donations and goodwill had subsided even before the Paris at-
tacks. There is only time for the present; for the shock of death, not
its relentless afterlife. Yet trauma has its own temporality (Giordano
2014); it recurs in multiple forms, over the long durée, and forces one
to be and live in time differently.
A focus on the emergency requires us to be surprised over and
over again; shocked, as if this were the first tragedy, the first horror
we had been confronted with. It is unsustainable—not simply in the
face of history—as recent articles have reminded us, comparing the
American desire to shut out all Syrian refugees to the closed doors
Jews encountered in the 1930s and ’40s (Neier 2015; Tharoor 2015;
Walter 2015)—but in terms of the emotional toll it takes to feel hor-
ror each time, as if it were the first time. Ultimately, one ceases to
feel.

THE PROBLEM WITH COMPASSION

Third, humanitarianism is about feelings rather than rights; it is
about compassion, not entitlement. Humanitarian exceptions are
precisely that—exceptions to regular laws. And they are usually made
on the basis of certain kinds of emotion. When migrants are spoken
of as humanitarian victims, we take them out of the range of the law
to where they have the right to be free from violence. Why must we
resort to exceptions, or to charity or benevolence, when Europe and
the United States claim to be exemplary practitioners of law and good
governance? As just one example, while calling itself humanitarian,
the US administration simultaneously suggested that it wanted to
strip some of the undocumented children of rights they had under the
William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization
Act, which makes immediate deportation illegal. Even though people

264   social research

have begun claiming “humanitarian rights,” by which they mean the
right to water, food, and shelter (Feldman 2011), in fact there is as of
yet no legal obligation to give aid, to rescue, or to care.
Instead, rather than having access to rights or laws, humanitar-
ian solutions depend on individual sensibilities, which, in turn, are
shaped by racialized and gendered ideas of who is a worthy subject of
compassion; ideas that wax, wane, and risk saturation or “compassion
fatigue.” Furthermore, compassion is a limited emotion: it chooses a
few exceptional individuals and excludes the rest—indeed, by its very
definition, compassion is unable to generalize. That is, according to
Arendt (1990, 85), it can be actualized only in particular situations in
which those who do not suffer come face to face with those who do.3
Insofar as it focuses on individuals and not structural realities, com-
passion cannot by itself further a politics of equality. Perhaps more
importantly, in its current, institutionalized forms humanitarianism
actually maintains inequality, in that it separates out two populations:
those who can feel and act on their compassion and those who must
be the subjects (or objects) of it; those who have the power to protect
and those who need protection.
Humanitarians have acknowledged compassion’s inability to
animate a political response. In war, humanitarians’ goal is to treat
as many individuals affected by violence as possible, responding with
compassion to the suffering of each; “humanitarian action’s single-
minded purpose [is] alleviating suffering, unconditionally and with-
out any ulterior motive” (de Torrente 2004, 5). But this is different
from condemning war, which is an (ethico-)political act. Indeed, when
humanitarians do feel compelled to condemn war outright, they re-
nounce their status as humanitarians; to pass explicit judgment is a
political stance and not compatible with humanitarian work, even
if humanitarianism is in itself, of course, a form of politics. This
was the case, for instance, in the context of the Rwandan genocide;
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) withdrew from their humanitarian
mission, since they could no longer pretend to be neutral and treat
each individual impartially. If humanitarian compassion cannot re-

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   265

spond politically to war, why would it offer us an adequate response
to the militarized violence at the border? Compassion does not trans-
form into political outrage, as it cannot be scaled up. It is simply not
activated in response to the larger, enduring patterns of people dying
at the borders of Europe or the United States: it not an appropriate
or adequate affective frame. As Nienass and Délano (this issue, 436)
state, “years of documenting and publicizing the fact that hundreds
and thousands of lives have been lost at the border have not led to a
different response in the wider public or at the policy level, despite
growing attention from the media.”
If we truly want to stop the growing numbers of dead at our
doorstep, we must work with migrants for justice, not find a substi-
tute in humanitarianism or charity. We need a different form of po-
litical care—beyond care as welfare, which is tied to the sovereignty
of nation-states, and includes the enforcement of borders—and be-
yond humanitarianism, which is tied to innocence, emergency and
compassion. That is, we need to think beyond care as a very particular
array of moral sentiments and social arrangements. Political work to
this end must be a shared act, which involves rethinking what politi-
cal action and justice mean for everyone, not just for those who are
understood as needing help or care, or for those who want to migrate.
We all must rethink what an equitable world would look like, as it
will affect us all. There are a number of movements already at work:
those who argue for basic human rights for all, including the right to
mobility. This is a powerful and important set of ideas, even as human
rights are still primarily granted by nation-states and still work on the
basis of theories of sovereignty and individualism. But people are also
playing with the framework of rights, pushing its limits. For instance,
in reaction to the more than 600 deaths off the coast of Lampedusa
in October 2013, activist groups came together to elaborate a Lampe-
dusa Charter,4 articulating the need for a radical transformation of
the social, economic, political, cultural, and legal relations that form
the basis of social injustice. It was a grassroots effort by North African
and European associations, movements, and networks in reaction to

266   social research

current migration control processes which have made the Mediter-
ranean into a cemetery. One could say the 20,000 deaths over the
past 20 years were what called this charter into being. Lampedusa is-
landers were themselves very involved; until then they had been left
alone to deal with migrant tragedies. They were not asking to close
doors to their island, but precisely the opposite: to protect migrants,
to critique the capitalist processes that lead to so many deaths, and to
question the distinction between Europeans and non-Europeans. The
charter claims to be planetary in scope and urges us to see the earth
as a shared space; however, in its final sections, it still falls back on
the language of rights, and argues in the name of humanity.
Many of the ideas in the Lampedusa Charter are echoed by
other radical strategies for justice and equality, but these others go
one step further in including the quest for open borders, grounded
on the idea of the struggle for the commons (Bridget et al. 2011; Agier
and Gemenne 2015). In this vision of the future we do away with
the concepts of “migrant” and “refugee” and even “citizen,” as their
meanings are grounded in exclusionary ideas of belonging. These
movements urge us to imagine new ways of being together at a global
scale, grounded on participation and labor, duty and obligation, and
shared common resources.
Finally, there are emergent practices of the political, such as
those that work to render dead bodies at the borders visible and sen-
sible. These are part of a different type of political project, explained
by philosophers like Jacques Rancière, for whom the political is the
action of reframing the real (Rancière 2010). The goal is to shift the
grammar of the sensible and what is rendered visible and invisible,
and in the process, forge new forms of collective enunciation. As
Nienass and Délano (this issue) eloquently argue in their article about
death and mourning at the US-Mexico border, activism that focuses
on making bodies and unmarked graves visible to a wider audience
function not to contain grief or to give it closure but rather to keep
the dead in our world, to expand our frame of visibility. In this way,
the specter of the dead, which increases in size each day, forces a

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders   267

reckoning with the larger political structures of violence and exclu-
sion that have caused these deaths. Stated differently, these forms
of activism insist on going beyond the temporality of emergency to
include the timelessness of death, and as such, they demand account-
ability and responsibility. The idea is to render it impossible to escape
these bodies—to have their images haunt us, acting as witnesses, and
demanding justice. Unlike compassion, this type of mourning is an
affective grammar that is politically potent.
To argue against humanitarian borders is not to argue against
a place for emotion in the face of the many dead; it is to make way
for feelings that fit with different projects for equality, with differ-
ent political visions. To argue against humanitarian borders is to call
for an affective politics that moves beyond a state of emergency, be-
yond feelings of pity for the innocent. Where is our outrage, our grief,
our hope?

NOTES
1. http://www.rescue.org/give-rescue-gifts-2015; http://www.oxfam
america.org/.
2. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/
File:Final_decisions_on_%28non-EU%29_asylum_applications,_
2014_%28number,_rounded_figures%29_YB15_IV.png
3. Here, Arendt argues that the exception to this rule of compassion
is Jesus Christ, as portrayed by Fyodor Dostoevsky; the sign of Jesus’
divinity was his ability to have compassion for all men in their singu-
larity, without lumping them together into one suffering mankind.
4. http://www.lacartadilampedusa.org/.

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