A More-Than-Human Analysis of Humanitarian Border Politics

Abstract

This chapter intervenes in an emergent debate regarding the significance of humanitarianism to contemporary border politics. Squire defines humanitarian politics as struggles that engage ‘the human’ as a political stake. The chapter highlights the importance of an approach that focuses on such struggles rather than solely upon humanitarian ethics or on humanitarian government. Existing approaches across the related fields of border and migration studies risk evading an interrogation of the category of ‘the human’ by focusing on the problematic of political agency. This leads to a recurring concern regarding agency as that which is ‘given and denied’. By contrast, the chapter develops a more-than-human approach to the analysis of humanitarian politics, which troubles assumptions about what it means to be human but nevertheless remains orientated towards people.