1004 EPD: Society and Space 38(6) is the new European Union initiative which creates opportunities for young people to volunteer or work in projects in their own country or abroad that benefit communities and people around Europe. . .such as helping to prevent natural disasters or rebuild afterwards, assisting in centres for asylum seekers, or addressing different social issues in communities. (European Commission, 2016b) Meanwhile Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, stated on its launch that the Solidarity Corps was designed ‘to help where it is needed most, to respond to crisis situations’ (European Commission, 2016c). The EU Solidarity Corps clearly ‘renders the compassion [of European young people] party to liberal forms of social regulation and control (Reid-Henry, 2014: 423). Thus the hotspot model, that includes efforts to govern compassion and the will to care of citizens, sits within wider assemblages and moral geographies that uncover not only attempts to govern the lives of life seekers but suggests concomitant attempts to manage inequality, insecurity and possible responses within a liberal democratic politics (see Duffield, 2010; Pallister-Wilkins, 2017b) that consolidates liberal forms of government rather than offer a politics of transformation (see Weizman, 2012). It is this that has led Reid-Henry to argue for humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic ‘helping to create and sustain a liberal worldview’ (2014: 427). Conclusion – Hotspots as liberal diagnostic In his discussion of humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic Reid-Henry suggests we think about humanitarianism as a form of government designed to ‘distinguish and frame solutions’ (2014: 425). Humanitarianism as a form of government tells us ‘how people who suffer today are to be thought about even as it reaches out to them’ (Reid-Henry, 2014: 426) while helping us get past the competing claims that humanitarianism is either the best solution for secular, ethical action or a fig-leaf for the pursuit of political and economic interests. As a liberal diagnostic, humanitarianism is not only about securing governmental order in unfamiliar places (Laidlaw, 2012). Instead through securing order in unfamiliar, localised places such as the hotspots and the Greek islands, a liberal order is also produced and consolidated in other places and at other spatial scales. Thus returning to the questions that were raised at the beginning of this article: what is humanitarianism and who is it for? It is possible to see that hotspots not only render life seekers party to the modern, advanced liberal tactics of the current global refugee regime (Lippert, 1999) using systems of efficient administration (Bulley, 2014: 71) but also enable policy makers and politicians to maintain liberal order elsewhere in the face of socio-political opposition to refugees, growing xenophobia and a fear of increasing support for far-right parties. The humanitarian geographies of the hotspots are therefore both local and transnational. Hotspots practice a liberal concern for life that takes not only life seekers as the subject but also includes European citizenry. In theory if not in practice the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots enable the effective management of the ‘migration crisis’ while ensuring the maintenance of a liberal order in Europe. Hotspots are the products of humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic where humanitarianism is a form of government in which ‘compassion is calibrated and put to work in the world’ (Reid-Henry, 2014: 428). Hotspots aim to capture the will-to-care present in modern liberal politics and the modern state with its focus on the security of populations, and put care to work in the most efficient and effective way for processes of control. At the same time, the hotspot model renders compassion itself a problem of order that needs to be captured and made effective to be deployed across the sites of the hotspot archipelago, the lines of flight of life seekers and European space.