992 EPD: Society and Space 38(6) Introduction The Greek islands and the hotspots found there have gone from being places of transit and registration to places of effective containment and the management and consolidation of crisis (see Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins, 2016). The hotspots are poorly defined by the European Union itself, yet are presented as the Union’s technical answer to how to ‘manage the undesirables’ (Agier, 2011) found within its ever-hardening external borders. The EU is unclear about what a hotspot actually is and does in policy documents and public pronouncements, preferring to refer to a ‘hotspot approach’ that is intended to ‘provide a platform for the agencies to intervene, rapidly and in an integrated manner, in frontline Member States when there is a crisis due to specific and disproportionate migratory pressure at their external borders’ (Statewatch, 2015). In practice, the hotspots are spaces made of a combination of functions designed with the purpose of controlling or interrupting people’s mobility, collecting their personal and biometric data (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2016) for the management of ‘crisis’ and in the hope of rendering them knowable and pliable to the sovereignty of European member states and EU border and asylum practices. As such hotspots have become semi-carceral spaces. Hotspots are not prisons or closed detention centres,1 however, as other reception and accommodation facilities across the Aegean islands are severely limited and people’s onward movement denied, the hotspots have, through design (as humanitarian agencies are considered part of the ‘integrated’ hotspot approach) and through necessity (due to their very limited provision of the necessary conditions for life) become spaces of humanitarianism. Meanwhile their function as registration and explicit border control points suggest they are both similar to and depart from traditional refugee camps that reflect the ‘interests of both states and humanitarian agencies for whom the concentration and segregation of refugees are politically and logistically expedient’ (Newhouse, 2015: 2294). As a part of the EU’s integrated border management system hotspots are ‘machines of many moving parts’ (Khalili, 2012: 239), intended as one-stop interoperable shops for the EU’s border management. Following the EU-Turkey Statement, the European Commission recognised that ‘the hotspots on the islands in Greece will need to be adapted – with the current focus on registration and screening before swift transfer to the mainland replaced by the objective of implementing returns to Turkey’ (European Commission, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). But as the implementation of returns to Turkey has come up against the rule of law preventing some returns and prolonging asylum requests hotspots have been transformed into de-facto quarantine spaces in the enforcement archipelago of island prisons used in the management of migration (Jones et al., 2017; Mountz, 2011). This containment has further iterated the hotspots as, in the words of a report for the EU Parliament’s LIBE Committee, spaces ‘to allow the Union to grant protection and humanitarian assistance in a swift manner to those in need’ (Neville et al., 2016). Yet according to humanitarian organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and human rights organisations such as Human Right’s Watch (HRW), the protection capabilities of the hotspots are questionable. In a 2017 report published by MSF-Greece on the anniversary of the EU-Turkey Statement, MSF claim ‘men, women and children seeking protection in Europe have spent up to a year in poorly adapted and unwinterised temporary shelters, with inadequate access to basic services including heating and hot water’ (MSF, 2017: 11).2 This includes 600 people on the island of Samos, as of mid-February 2017, living in unheated accommodation with limited access to clean water and decent sanitation facilities. Meanwhile life seekers3 have told of widespread drug and alcohol abuse in Moria, as well as sexual harassment, violence and daily fights. On Samos and Lesvos, MSF teams have