Pallister-Wilkins 1005 Thus, in conclusion, this article has argued that the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots consolidate the presence of concomitant and co-constitutive practices of care and control in liberal government. It has complicated the focus on care for distant strangers in humanitarianism by showing what techniques of liberal government are deployed when those strangers become proximate. It has argued that hotspots work to keep life seekers distant-while-proximate through the application of liberal techniques aimed at managing and securing life. This differs from those practices also present in Europe that suggest a ‘violent inaction’ through processes of abandonment such as those found at Calais (see Davies et al., 2017). In addition, the hotspot approach differs from those practices that seek to govern migration through death (see Squire, 2017). Hotspots instead work to manage disaster effectively, incorporating a range of practices that render life seekers subject to liberal techniques and the desire to help party to liberalism that works to insulate liberal order from mobility and ‘irrational’ compassion. Building on this, hotspots also differ from those practices that govern through death or the exception in other ways. They are underpinned by what has been identified in colonial humanitarianism as a will to ‘do the right thing’ and the maintenance of honour (see Lester and Dussart, 2014: 24), where doing the right thing, the maintenance of honour and the prevention of a politics of exception come to form a ‘way of being governmental’ (Lester and Dussart, 2014: 21) setting limits on sovereign violence while making possible its ‘mobius-like’ recuperation for the maintenance of a liberal order (Reid-Henry, 2014: 425). Here, the presence of death within violent border practices and a humanitarian response that seeks to make live as opposed to let die comes to consolidate sovereignty and liberalism itself (see Weizman, 2012), setting limits on the extent to which a liberal humanitarianism can form the basis of a radical political counterpoint. Thus the hotspots’ humanitarian geographies become apparent, not through their success in the provision of care to life seekers – at this they seemingly fail and fail demonstrably – but instead through the presence and use of humanitarian rationalities in the maintenance of Europe’s own security and efficacy and their work in keeping strangers politically distant, cared for but not equal. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Notes 1. People are not ‘officially’ detained in the hotspots (although they may be held for three days during initial identification procedures, extendable up to 25 days). 2. Two years on 18 March 2018. 3. I use the term life seeker to break beyond the dichotomy of refugee and migrant that currently structures much of the humanitarian practice surrounding responding to displaced populations in need, through the Refugee Convention and Protocol. It is used to refer to both people on the move and people who are stuck, whose mobility and/or stasis is impacted by processes of mobility injustice (Sheller, 2012) shaped by the EU’s restrictive border policies. 4. Apostolos Veizis, Medical Director MSF-Greece, personal communication with author.