Five years into its implementation, those arriving and caught up in the hotspot system are still being warehoused where they are not wanted, pushed back to where they came from and constantly moved around at will. With the introduction of fast track asylum procedures and geographical movement restrictions on the islands, hotspots have become spaces where exceptional rules apply and where mobility is explicitly targeted.

This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for?

This article deals with the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Italy and in Greece, drawing attention to strategies of containment aimed at disciplining mobility and showing how they are not narrowed to detention infrastructures.

This paper intervenes in recent debates on humanitarianism and security in migration by introducing the notion of ‘pop-up governance’. It reflects on our two year-long fieldwork on Lesbos, Greece at the peak of Europe’s migrant reception crisis (2015–2017).

This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geopoliticization of humanitarianism and its geosocial discontents. It documents the ways in which Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer.

Drawing on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, conducted in Lesvos, Samos, and Athens (from March to September 2016), we examine how resistance to a bordered reality took place, as islands in the north Aegean, as well as Greek and European territories, were being remapped according to the logic of the hotspot.

Following Lauren Berlant and Dominic Boyer, we take the current moment as an opportunity to reconsider infrastructure and to work toward a perspective that would see it as a resource from which to construct more creative and equitable futures.

With an eye toward contemporary techno-utopian schemes and city-building initiatives, I argue that the basis of technological approaches to urban rule today—a conception of cities as complex socio-economic systems amenable to market-driven optimization—was forged by postwar administrators and technicians in response to the vicissitudes of uneven development.

By following the transfers of armored vehicles to police, this article illuminates the logistical pathways that connect colonial warfare and domestic policing, adding an account of the material composition of police power to the historical work of critical and abolitionist thinkers.