994 EPD: Society and Space 38(6) of modern liberal sovereignty in the future. Understanding humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic enables a reading of hotspots as humanitarian. This is done through the way hotspots exercise power over life through enhancing the security of life seekers while securing and enhancing the political order of European states by (arguably) ‘offering more efficient ways to respond’ (Reid-Henry, 2014: 425) to the ‘migration crisis’. As a response to the migration crisis, the hotspot approach works to re-inscribe processes of violence that make humanitarian protection necessary in the first instance and suggest how care and control are performed as part of wider European government. This article is based on a long-running engagement with humanitarian practices in border control and in border spaces. The argument I present here is predominantly theoretical in nature but grows out of a substantive ethnographic engagement with humanitarian efforts by both border police and humanitarian actors at Europe’s borders and predominantly in Greece. I have conducted fieldwork on the Aegean islands and in the hotspots on a number of occasions between 2015 and the present as well as engaging repeatedly with humanitarian practitioners in their offices and headquarters across Europe. It is intended to broaden discussions of humanitarian government in the present while being fully cognisant of the complex humanitarian politics of the hotspots themselves (see MSF, 2016). My argument proceeds as follows. First, I trace the emergence of humanitarianism’s seemingly contradictory demands of care and control through its relationship to the growth of modern government and the emergence of circulation and population as the field of security. Here, I further focus on the concomitant existence of the effective management of disaster and the rationalisation of compassion. Second, I examine the traditional geographies of humanitarianism concerned with saving distant strangers and the spatial and socio-political strategies of containment used for keeping strangers distant even in cases of close proximity. Third, I examine the specific management of populations in the hotspots asking questions about the unsettling of traditional humanitarian geographies of distance and separation while consolidating long-running geographies of population management. Finally, I suggest that the hotspots practice humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic, performing care for not-so-distant strangers while also working to maintain liberal sovereignty in Europe itself. Highlighting in the process the ever-present paradoxes within humanitarianism, the ever-changing technologies of humanitarianism and the ways that ‘humanitarianism is not the same humanitarianism all the time’ (Feldman, 2012: 160), or to build on Feldman, the same humanitarianism across different spaces. Care and control in humanitarianism There is considerable work in a variety of disciplines examining the growth of the management of migrant mobilities focused on processes of detention and incarceration (Bosworth, 2014; Martin, 2012; Mountz, 2011). Alongside this there has been an emerging body of literature that has tracked the logics of care and control in the policing of mobility (Albahari, 2015; Fassin, 2012; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015a; Sheller, 2012; Ticktin, 2005; Williams, 2015). Much of this work builds on Foucauldian approaches to security, that understand the emergence of security as a field of modern government and a particular political rationality of liberal government with a genealogy we can uncover (Foucault, 2009). Meanwhile wider work in critical humanitarianism studies is keen to highlight what appears to be a paradox, or contradiction between care and control in the practicing of humanitarianism. Craig Calhoun has characterised this paradox as one between the normative and the instrumental rationalities of humanitarianism. Normative, or valuerationality is concerned with the provision of care and dominates mainstream