Pallister-Wilkins 993 witnessed firsthand people’s mental and physical health deteriorates over time. There has been a ‘2.5 fold increase in the percentage of patients with symptoms of anxiety and depression, and a threefold increase in the percentage of patients with post traumatic stress disorder’ and symptoms of psychosis have also increased (MSF, 2017: 13). Meanwhile women in Moria are reported to be wearing adult nappies overnight rather than use the unsafe and unsanitary toilet facilities.4 This catalogue of suffering seems to stand in stark contrast to the growth of the ‘humanitarian border’ (Walters, 2011) where practices of border control and border policing elide with or use humanitarian concerns for life in the policing of mobility (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015a, 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Academic work focusing on the growth of the humanitarian border has shown how humanitarian concerns for saving lives and providing basic relief for life seekers as they encounter violent borders (Jones, 2016) works to expand borders and borderwork (Jones et al., 2017). However, hotspots seem to show how borderwork appears to shrink humanitarian imagination (Lester and Dussart, 2014). Therefore, how in the face of the conditions produced by the hotspots can the hotspots be considered within geographies of humanitarianism? This would seem counterintuitive at best and insulting at worse. In this article, I argue that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two further fundamental questions: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? I argue that humanitarianism is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20thcentury (see Barnett, 2011) and instead concerns developments designed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure imminently mobile populations – as potential subjects of harm and potentially harmful – for the maintenance of modern liberal sovereignty alongside and through the securing of life (see Vernon, 2014). In doing this, my argument builds on work in critical humanitarianism studies that has mapped the intersection of care and control in governing vulnerable populations (Agier, 2011; Feldman and Ticktin, 2012; Hyndman, 2000); charted a humanitarian reason in the government of populations (Fassin, 2012); and highlighted the ways humanitarian concerns for life structure not only sovereignty’s ability to make live but also to make die (Weizman, 2012). As such it takes an expansive view of humanitarianism and humanitarian government, moving beyond more mainstream and conventional emergency humanitarianism concerned with providing relief in times of particular suffering (Barnett, 2011), to consider genealogies of caring and, taking a Foucauldian approach, population security in the establishment of modern (read western), liberal sovereignty. Liberal sovereignty here is understood as forming the foundation of the modern, European state as it emerged in the 18th-century and as a particular political, social and economic ordering system structuring ‘the basis of a wealthy civilisation founded on capitalism in which general concern for human wellbeing can flourish’ (Asad, 2015: 392). This results in sovereignty being more than the control of territory but includes the ability to provide effective protection to the population in its entirety. Building on this role of protection in the modern state I unsettle some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitarianism as care for distant strangers. In this, I am aided by recent work on colonial humanitarianism highlights how care for distant strangers deployed expansive moral geographies that were concomitantly about saving distant, colonised others and maintaining a liberal order ‘at home’ (Lester and Dussart, 2014). This critical reading of humanitarianism and the hotspots offers empirical weight to what Simon Reid-Henry has called ‘humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic’ that identifies and characterises problems in particular, humanitarian, ways and frames particular, humanitarian, solutions (2014: 425). Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic orders morality and mitigates against insecurity in the present and works for the reproduction and maintenance