Pallister-Wilkins 999 containment, reliance on outside assistance and their legal status as refugees (see Hoffmann, 2017). Within this, new technologies of remote management create increased impressions of distance and proximity to recipients through the use of ever more elaborate big-data systems designed to tailor aid delivery (Hoffmann, 2017; see also Read, Taithe and Mac Ginty (2016)). Meanwhile humanitarian aid is provided through humanitarian organisations to create and maintain the impression that humanitarian assistance is distant from state interests, even while humanitarianism is reliant on the sovereign permission of states to operate and much of the aid distributed is state funded. Refugee camps are a technical solution for providing the necessary conditions for life and for effectively managing disaster on behalf of states, and a wider global refugee-regime fronted by the UNHCR. Refugee camps work to keep refugee populations at a distance even while they are within sovereign territory. Refugee camps are of course located somewhere, within the sovereign territory of a state, and also speak to a shift away from forms of containing ‘disaster’ and a Foucauldian move to manage it effectively using a range of techniques designed to govern the population through ensuring the necessary conditions for life. As I have argued humanitarianism’s dominant geographical imagination concerns the provision of care and the relief of suffering to distant strangers with the refugee camp acting as a tool to provide assistance to strangers while in close proximity. However, within popular humanitarian and Eurocentric imaginations these refugee camps are located in regions and countries far away from the headquarters of humanitarian organisations and the seats of global power, responding to disasters in far-away places. The ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe has challenged this traditional, Eurocentric humanitarian imagination. The strangers are no longer distant to Europeans they are in European towns and cities; they are what I call distant-while-proximate. They can be found walking along European roads, taking a variety of European transport, using European supermarkets, and trying to cross European borders like Europeans. As such they are no longer distant strangers in need of care in the European imagination. Life seekers are on European holiday beaches and holiday resorts and in European city squares alive with European café culture. From the standpoint of Europe in the current age, the strangers are no longer distant geographically, nor are they abject or easily objectified and thus proximity unsettles the dominant modus operandi of humanitarian intervention that seeks to save distant strangers and keep them distant. The strangers are now within the borders of Europe and must be managed effectively for their own wellbeing and for the maintenance of European liberalism through the imposition of a range of techniques usually practiced elsewhere, in non-European, distant places. However, while the strangers are now not distant in a geographical sense, they must remain distant in the socio-political sense and thus the logics of effective disaster management remain and become entwined with wider, exclusive processes of bordering. These arguments around keeping people distant in the socio-political sense through the effective management of disaster alongside and with exclusive border practices are found for example in the thinking behind the EU-Turkey Statement as articulated by its ‘architect’ Gerald Knaus (see MSF, 2017). Knaus has argued that the hotspot approach within wider systems of mobility governance and border control must enact what Khalili and Hajjar have called an ethical commitment towards others who are not quite (and cannot be) equal (2013). Through this ethical commitment that enforces exclusion Knaus argues the hotspots can operate effectively to secure liberal European politics from the potential harm brought by mobile populations. Harm here for Knaus is a retreat from liberal politics amongst European citizens and their political representatives and a demand for increased illiberal, restrictive and xenophobic policies expressed through increasing support for far-right,