"Humanitarian Borders" offers us, in perhaps somewhat unexpected ways, the possibility to ‘think otherwise’ through consistently highlighting the inherent absurdity and obscenity of what Pallister-Wilkins terms the ‘humanitarianesque carnival.’

"Humanitarian Borders" by Polly Pallister-Wilkins does many things, all of them beautifully. For me, it tells the story of an island, a looping “crisis”, and a carnival.

Some care is revolutionary, and revolutionary struggles are rooted in an ethic of caring for and with. In the context of borders that kill, we need to pay attention to forms of care and life-saving that shrink borders.

Reading Pallister-Wilkins’ observations about care, control and rescue as core manifestations of both humanitarian and bordering practice alongside Black and Indigenous feminist theories, we learn how care is instrumentalized to mask inequity and violence.

Humanitarian Borders is an invitation to critically rethink (and begin to remake) humanitarian action with the ultimate aim of dismantling the ‘global colour line’.

‍“Humanitarian Borders" helps us to close the geographical and conceptual distance between Mediterranean “deathscapes”, and my own land, girt by an increasingly violent sea, a world away.

"Humanitarian Borders" is an expression of Pallister-Wilkins’ anger at the limits of a liberal politics of rescue and a caution against seeing “life-saving efforts as a panacea or as a sustainable and just ‘solution’ to the violence and harm caused by unequal mobility.”

The ocean is suffocating, and law is an important reason why. In this short film, we question the very basis of ocean law and its dependence on the land-water binary and argue for unmaking rather than fixing existing modes of law.

Will new data technologies support oceans governance? Our work on bluefin & sea turtle tracking suggests they can be the grounds for debate over contested spaces & resources. #UNDecade must attend to how institutions will engage & navigate new data. 

The oceanic turn in recent humanities and social science is bound up with anxieties about future seaborne crisis. Call it the oceanic churn, and look to waves as diagnostic – material patterns of physical force, full of organismic life caught up in propagative and foaming process.