Consolidating the Humanitarian Border Call for papers for ISA, 16th-19th March 2016, Atlanta Panel organised by: Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam The last few years has seen the emergence of what has been termed the humanitarian border, where humanitarian logics of governance come to shape and impact on bordering practices. Scholars have examined the emergence of these logics in the context of international organisations working to manage migration, within state border policies, amongst border policing and in a variety of locations including Australia, the US and Europe. It has been argued that humanitarian logics concerned with the saving of lives should not be considered a challenge to conventional border control practices. Instead humanitarian approaches concerned with securing the human and traditional border policing concerned with securing the border, while at times in tension, have mutually achievable goals as both perform interventions at the level of individual migrant bodies. Thus, humanitarianism becomes a legitimating and consolidating tool for the continuation of traditional border policing practices concerned with governing movement. This emergence of border policing framed or justified in humanitarian terms has the additional effect of making critiques of such practices increasingly difficult as the invocation of humanity stakes out a powerful subject position. In addition humanitarian practices at the border, call on the logic of emergency that works to fix events in time and space, while depoliticising and erasing the violent effects of the border and discounting the political practices and failures underpinning so-called emergencies. This panel aims to explore the continued consolidation of the humanitarian border conceptually and in a range of sites and situations. Asking questions of the mutuality of humanitarian and policing interventions and exploring the ways in which the humanitarian border can be understood concomitantly in biopolitical and territorial terms. The panel aims to address the ways in which current humanitarian border practices both re-trench and challenge existing theories and ideas around what a humanitarian rationale of government looks like, what humanitarian action looks like, where it takes places and how it intersects with other normative ideals in the international such as human rights. The panel is interested in looking at the humanitarian border in historical, postcolonial and from different spatial perspectives. In addition the panel is interested in exploring the range of actors involved in the humanitarian border, from traditional state agents, militaries and border police, humanitarian agencies, and private philanthropists. Questioning what it means for humanitarianism and border enforcement to see such a range of actors involved in the humanitarian border. Please submit an abstract of 200 words by Wednesday 27th May to p.e.pallister-wilkins@uva.nl. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions and also feel free to circulate to all you networks.