The Humanitarian Fix: Aid, Containment, and the Political Economy of Surplus Life

This talk argues that humanitarian infrastructures at Europe’s borders do not merely alleviate suffering, but reorganise space and social life as a governable and value-generating terrain. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Greece, I develop the concept of the humanitarian fix: the strategic mobilisation of aid to absorb and manage surpluses of mobility, property, and labour at the EU frontier. Through the lenses of extractive hospitality and humanitarian exploitation, I trace how refugee housing programmes were calibrated to reactivate distressed real-estate markets while withholding tenancy rights from those they housed, and how the NGO-isation of welfare produced a precarious care workforce disciplined by the moral temporality of crisis itself. By de-exceptionalising humanitarianism within analyses of migration and racial capitalism, the talk shows how contained lives are differentially rendered productive within circuits of accumulation, and asks what it might mean to disarticulate emergency from extraction by reclaiming crisis politics from below.