998 EPD: Society and Space 38(6) However, there is potency to the idea of distance in humanitarian practice. Distance here is not only a geographic distance between different spaces and places; instead distance as suggested by the ‘saving of distant strangers’ is also a distance marked by self and other. In the case of medical humanitarians, medical ethics dictates the creation and maintenance of a professional distance. Therefore, distance is also distance in social relations. This distance in social relations extends beyond medical humanitarianism and comes to structure relations between humanitarian actor and humanitarian subject in wider humanitarian practice. It has become a central feature of efficiency and the professionalisation of the field and historically marks the shift from charitable giving ‘at home’ to more expansive attempts at saving distant strangers. The universalised ideals underpinning humanitarian sentiment necessitates distance, it requires that the humanitarian subject remains other, as a victim with needs rather than a person with full subjecthood. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin have discussed humanitarianism’s tendency to deny subjecthood to recipients and the objectifying role of much humanitarianism in thought and practice (2012). Meanwhile humanitarian practitioners themselves are aware of this limit within their work and controversies often revolve around the denial of subjecthood to humanitarian ‘victims’ and the needs of effective management. Furthermore, the work of border control, in which the hotspot approach claims to be a part, is concerned with maintaining this distinction between self and other, between citizens and those excluded from the full-rights of citizenship. And in recent years, there has been a growth of humanitarianism in border control practices (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2015a, 2017a, 2017b, 2018) whereby humanitarianism enacts what Laleh Khalili and Lisa Hajjar describe as an ethical commitment towards others who are not quite regarded as equal (2013). These contradictory geographies, of what I will call distant-while-proximate, are perhaps most visible in what has come to be the key site in the humanitarian imaginary: the refugee camp (see Agier, 2011; Hyndman, 2000; Newhouse, 2015). Here, the problems of ‘saving distant strangers’ are brought to the fore, where distance and proximity co-exist in spaces of containment. As was discussed earlier, humanitarianism as a technique emerged to manage disasters effectively (Reid-Henry, 2014) and to secure order in unfamiliar places (Laidlaw, 2012) rather than just to contain them and to prevent them spreading. This is a logic we can understand as deeply Foucauldian in its approach to security, to the securing of ‘bad things’ in order to facilitate and secure wider social, political and economic forces while letting them flourish (2009: 45). However, this does not mean that humanitarian practice does not engage in processes of containment during this effective management and securing of order in unfamiliar and distant places. Here, we see the use of spatial and carceral techniques of government to secure wider processes of circulation. In earlier work, I explored such spatial practices in relation to the work that security barriers do in securing populations, not through blocking in their entirety but through carefully calibrating life in the Foucauldian sense (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2015b, 2016). Humanitarianism engages in similar calibrating practices through refugee camps. The refugee camp as a tool for the effective management of disaster is designed to maintain distance between self and other in instances of close spatial proximity, echoing the dialectical relationship in processes of modernity between strangers in spatially disaggregated societies and the reaffirmation of the local and personal (Vernon, 2014). Humanitarians have developed a range of practices that keep strangers distant while in close proximity including: geographical containment within semi-carceral spaces of the camp through the presence of security forces and carceral architectures; economically distant through the denial of the right to work and a reliance on humanitarianism for the provision of basic needs; and politically distant through the use of a combination of spatial