Humanitarian Borders

Praise

“Polly Pallister-Wilkins is the ideal guide on a journey to the front lines of contemporary debates about borders and immigration. Timely, thought-provoking, and well-written, Humanitarian Borders is a must read that exposes the disingenuous ways state violence at borders is repackaged as noble humanitarianism.”
—Reece Jones, author of Violent Borders

“Saving lives while taking lives is the perverse logic of global borders today,’ writes Polly Pallister-Wilkins in her deft account of the intertwining of life and death, of policing and aid, of present ‘crisis’ and colonial hauntings, at the security frontline of today’s borders. Humanitarian Borders is an engaging and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of humanitarianism and to the wider quest for an alternative politics of mobility in the shadow of fences, camps and walls.”
—Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford

“Humanitarian Borders crosses intellectual borders of international politics, decoloniality and migration to bring readers into an analysis of mobility injustice that may be uncomfortable, but is absolutely necessary. How does the need to help, justified by a primordial plea to ‘save lives’ become part and parcel of a branded effort to produce inequalities amongst the helpers and the helped? Decolonizing humanitarian borders is urgently needed and this book is an excellent place to start.”
—Lisa Ann Richey, coauthor (with Alexandra Cosima Budabin) of Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development