context? We raise these questions not specifically in order to demonstrate that humanitarianism is progressively shrinking but, rather, to explore under which new guises humanitarian reason unfolds in front of health threats and how it becomes entangled with political technologies of migration governance. In migration studies and critical security studies literatures, scholars have engaged with the multiple ways in which humanitarian practices and discourses are intertwined with securitisation processes (Aradau, 2004; Cuttitta, 2018; Perkowski, 2018), with border policies (Albahari, 2015) and with military operations (AUTHOR A ET AL). Migrant lives have become governed through ambivalent modes of “care and control” (Isleyen, 2018; Pallister-Wilkins, 2016). Didier Fassin and Miriam Ticktin have highlighted the hierarchies of lives that humanitarianism generates and enhances (Fassin, 2011; Ticktin, 2011). As some scholars have noted, the racialised inequalities that humanitarian interventions reiterate should be read in light of the colonial legacies and situated at the very heart of humanitarianism (De Genova, 2018; Salvatici, 2015). As far as the Mediterranean Sea is concerned, critical migration scholars have analysed the key role that NGOs have played in conducting search and rescue activities and the different political positionalities of humanitarian actors engaging at sea (AUTHOR B). Notably, William Walters (2011: 155) has introduced the concept of the “humanitarian border” in order to emphasise that “border regimes are composed not just at the level of strategies and technologies of control, but also at the level of strategies which combine elements of protest and visibilization with practices of pastoral care, aid, and assistance”. Importantly, he looks at the humanitarian border as a specific and recent reconfiguration of the border regime, though cautioning against taking it as a distinctly novel paradigm.iii For Walters (2011: 146), the humanitarian border emerges in particular along “faultlines [. . .] where it seems that the worlds designated by the terms Global North and Global South confront one another in a very concrete, abrasive way.” The Mediterranean border undoubtedly constitutes such a faultline where every intervention by EUrope, as AUTHOR B (2019) argues, “ranging from increased surveillance to military anti-smuggling missions and collaborations with North African authorities, has been framed as humanitarian measures to end death at sea. Protecting not merely the lives of those seeking to ‘irregularly’ cross the maritime border but also ‘the border’ itself, appear not as incompatible but reconcilable aims, in the sense that increased militarised governance and surveillance would heighten the chances of detecting and rescuing migrants on unseaworthy boats.” The merging of “humanitarian and militarised logics” in what some have conceived as “compassionate border security” (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 535) has thus been widely noted. 5