Special issue article Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism EPD: Society and Space 2020, Vol. 38(6) 991–1008 ! The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0263775818754884 journals.sagepub.com/home/epd Polly Pallister-Wilkins University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Abstract This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? The article understands humanitarianism as a logic of government that is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20th-century. Instead humanitarianism is understood as concerning logics developed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure (in both senses of the word) imminently mobile populations for the maintenance of liberal order alongside and through the securing of life. The article takes an expansive view of humanitarian government to consider genealogies of caring and population security logics in the establishment of modern, western and liberal states. The article unsettles some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitarianism as care for distant strangers and considers the ways compassion is rationalised by the hotspot approach. This critical reading of humanitarianism and the hotspots offers empirical weight to what has been called ‘humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic’, through which humanitarianism is deployed to secure both life and a liberal political order across multiple scales. Keywords Hotspots, humanitarianism, mobility, care, control, disaster On 25 November 2016, in Moria ‘hotspot’ camp on Lesbos, a woman and child were killed in a fire after a gas canister attached to a hot plate exploded inside their small nylon tent. They were using the hot plate to try and keep warm. As a result of the accident, two people died and many more were injured. . . Later that month, three young men died in Moria camp and a fourth was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Survivors and friends reported that the deceased had no pre-existing medical conditions. To keep warm, the men had been burning cardboard, plastic and scraps of wood in the tents they shared. (MSF, 2017: 12) Corresponding author: Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam, Postbus 15578, Amsterdam 1001 NB, Netherlands. Email: P.E.Pallister-Wilkins@uva.nl