1The notion of confinement is generally associated with public health policies established from 2020 onwards in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic, and with the idea of mass home confinement ̶ with the exception of so-called essential workers. Admittedly, the restriction of mobility and the sanctioning of illegal displacement in the name of the health emergency experienced during the Covid-19 crisis bears similarities to humanitarian confinement and its entanglement of logics of protection, control and sorting of (im)mobilized people. However, the forms of immobilization that this dossier proposes to explore are quite different: less mediatized, addressed to portions of the world’s population specifically constructed as vulnerable, and deployed in the shadow of the virtuous sentiments of “humanitarian ideology” (Hours, 1998). How do the entanglement of humanitarian and security registers contribute to the spatial and temporal immobilization of populations constructed as “vulnerable”, and what social relations of power are (re)played out?

2First coined by anthropologist Chowra Makaremi, “humanitarian confinement” refers to the paradoxical contribution made by foreigners’ rights associations in establishing a new regime of border incarceration, French “waiting zones” (2009). Although the humanitarian dimension of the phenomenon was not formally invested, numerous works have articulated the analysis of exile confinement with the study of migration policies (Loyd & Mountz, 2014) and the informality of camps (Pasquetti & Picker, 2017). Giuseppe Campesi’s research has enabled a new conceptualization of humanitarian confinement as “a reception system that offers aid and hospitality to asylum seekers, while subjecting them to a subtle form of control ensured by humanitarian agents” (2015: 17), in the wake of a body of Anglophone research on humanitarianism relatively little discussed in France. It is precisely this field that we intend to invest, extending the dialogue opened by the Journal des Anthropologues with the critical study of the humanitarian sector and non-governmental organizations over twenty years ago (Bourdarias et al, 2003).

Critical approaches to humanitarianism

3This thematic dossier partakes in the field of critical studies of humanitarianism, which underwent abundant development from the 1990s and a major revival in the 2010s following the publication of numerous works in anthropology (Agier, 2008; Bornstein & Redfield, 2011; Fassin, 2010a; Feldman & Ticktin, 2010) and history (Barnett, 2013; Lester & Dussart, 2014). Despite considerable heterogeneity in terms of scientific and political approaches and postures, critical studies of humanitarianism agree on a definition of humanitarianism as a “passion for compassion” ̶ to use the classic Arendtian formulation ̶ that is embodied in specific programs and organizations. These are characterized by the desire to alleviate suffering and preserve human lives, acting in situations defined as crisis and according to the temporalities of emergency (Calhoun, 2010). The resulting humanitarian operations are always articulated with other authorities and logics (economic, security, etc.), but they are presented as neutral, independent and responding solely to ethical imperatives. They reformulate “political questions in a moral language” (Reid-Henry, 2013: 753) and thus tend to invisibilize the structural causes of inequalities and the social relations of domination at play (Ticktin, 2011a). At the same time, institutions that act “in the name of humanity” shape asymmetrical relationships with the individuals they intend to save or assist, and who must conform to the figure of the passive, innocent and dependent subject, and to the image of the victim without history (Malkki, 2015).

4Humanitarianism can thus be conceived as a tool of global governance (Hours & Selim, 2011) and as a particular modality of government, a government of threat and care (Feldman & Ticktin, 2010) producing its own hierarchies of humanity, scales of merit and suffering, and a specific moral economy (Fassin, 2010b). However, humanitarianism is far from acting exclusively at the level of morality and representations. Indeed, the implementation of humanitarian actions determines fundamental material consequences, which can intervene right down to the bodily and biological scale of individuals (Ticktin, 2011b). The concept of humanitarian confinement discussed in this dossier invites us to heuristically explore a specific “productive” dimension of humanitarianism (Ferguson, 1990): that relating to the production of space.

5Research on humanitarianism has often focused on its spatiality, apprehending it from both a transnational and a local perspective. For example, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, in their investigation of colonial humanitarianism in the British Empire, have analyzed not only the differential geographies that emerge from the globalized chain of “donors-philanthropists-recipients” (2014: 11), but also the sites of colonial humanitarian action (such as religious missions and Protectorate stations), described as spaces of conflict and negotiation. The spatial dimension of humanitarianism also emerges in analyses that don’t claim to address humanitarian ideology as their main object of study, but do treat it with finesse, such as Marc Bernardot’s socio-historical study of “foreigners’ camps” in France (2008). Humanitarianism is central to this study, in terms of the ideological justification for the camp system, and the presence of humanitarian organizations operating within it.

The roots and contributions of “humanitarian confinement”

6The confinement studied here is a particular variation on the various spatialization processes of humanitarianism. It refers to the study of places and dynamics that limit, modify or proscribe certain forms of mobility or immobility for the recipients of humanitarian action. Mobilizing the concept of humanitarian confinementenables us to develop a more comprehensive approach to modes of humanitarian governance of mobility, by articulating different scales and varied power mechanisms of a more or less coercive and diffuse nature. Humanitarian confinement thus encompasses structures of confinement where restrictions on movement are almost absolute; it thus draws on recent analyses of “prison humanitarianism” (Olivier, 2017), “militarized humanitarianism” (Bernstein, 2010) and “refugee carcerality” (Martin & Tazzioli, 2023). However, the approach proposed here invites us to inscribe these forms of humanitarian retention and detention within a broader and more flexible typology, which also includes reception centers for asylum seekers in Europe, refugee camps in the global South, border spaces, airport waiting zones, and even certain urban spaces of relegation as proposed by Leïla Drif in this issue.

7In addition to this expanded and stratified taxonomy, another fruitful contribution of the concept of humanitarian confinementlies in the possibility it offers of jointly analyzing the multiple categories of “beneficiaries” of humanitarian aid, taking into account the dissimilarities and analogies, hierarchies and circulations between different publics of humanitarian government. This makes it possible to weave a fruitful dialogue between anthropological studies on the inhabitants of humanitarian camps (Agier, 2008; Picker & Pasquetti, 2015), border studies concerned with populations who cross “humanitarian borders” (Pallister-Wilkins, 2016; Walters, 2011) and feminist research on anti-trafficking programs for women (Agustín, 2003; Gallagher & Pearson, 2010; Kempadoo et alii, 2005; Miramond, 2020; Shih, 2023).

8As the various contributions in this dossier show, the concept of humanitarian confinement still invites us to consider not only the dynamics of immobilization and containment (Bernardie-Tahir & Schmoll, 2018) maintained by humanitarian actors (see Andrea Gallinal), but also forms of dispersion (Tazzioli, 2020), channeling (Kasparek, 2016) and forced mobility (see Simone Di Cecco and Fred Salin). The mechanisms uncovered, deployed in the name of principles of humanity and protection of “vulnerable” individuals, transform the spatial and social trajectories of these people, while producing specific categorizations and knowledge (see Aditi Surie von Czechowski).

9Finally, the concept of humanitarian confinement allows us to look at subtle, flexible mechanisms of domination, which come under the heading of surveillance, blackmail and threat ̶ studied by Maxime Christophe, Amal Khaleefa and Valentina Napolitano ̶ that establish constrained and uncertain temporalities. Combined with a retraction of space, time dilation (Kobelinsky, 2014), explored in particular by Leïla Drif, can be “temporal sequestration” (Avalos, 2021), with varying degrees of viscosity (Griffiths, 2014). Many are the tactics and resistances opposed to the “humanitarian (b)order of things” (De Lauri, 2019) by the people and populations it governs. The articles in this series therefore seek to understand the perimeter and limits of humanitarian confinement from the point of view of these margins for maneuver, without forgetting the modes of accommodation, circumvention, negotiation and resignification implemented in humanitarian spaces ̶ in particular the contributions by Andrea Gallinal, Amal Khaleefa and Valentina Napolitano.

What are the experiences of humanitarian space retractions?

10How do the policies of putting people on hold and in dependence, under the umbrella of humanitarian organizations, programs and discourse, contribute not only to the creation but also to the perpetuation of humanitarian confinement mechanisms? To what extent do populations constructed as “vulnerable” invest in, resignify and resist the experience of immobilization imposed “for their own good”? In this dossier, the concept of humanitarian confinement has been put to the field test in an empirical and original way, with contributions that develop resolutely qualitative and ethnographic investigative methods, without refraining from using archives (Fred Salin) or statistics (Maxime Christophe). This approach has enabled the various contributors to go beyond an analysis of the mechanisms or humanitarian actors who implement them, by giving a central place to the voices and trajectories of individuals and social groups directly affected by humanitarian confinement.

11The contributions focus on different geographical contexts, in France at the heart of Europe, in its border territories (the Canary Islands and Italy), its distant margins (Lebanon), and beyond (Jordan and Tanzania). They explore the spatial, social and temporal relegations at play on different scales, examining both the micro-dynamics and the geopolitics of humanitarian confinement. They approach humanitarian confinement through the prism of the conflicts to which they give rise, questioning the individual or collective strategies established to evade integration into these arrangements or escape from them.

12While this volume focuses on contemporary forms of humanitarian confinement, it does not ignore their historical roots and political reconfigurations. Tracing the colonial legacy of differential treatment of refugees in France, Fred Salin’s contribution reveals the forms of dispersion, racial hierarchization and confinement imposed in the accommodation centers established in the 1970s. The transition “from spatial assignment to economic assignment” consists in a policy of rapidly employing refugees, analyzed as humanitarian commodification.

13Andrea Gallinal’s study of the Canary Islands, a relatively marginal European border area activated during the Covid-19 pandemic, explores the confinement and encampment of exiles in an insular context. From 2020 onwards, when over 20,000 people landed in the Spanish archipelago, discriminatory measures were put in place on a long-term basis, with humanitarian and sanitary justifications. Leïla Drif also studies the perpetuation of a regime of exception, focusing on the emblematic case of Syrian exiles in Lebanon ̶ a country which, without recognizing their refugee status and the rights that go with it, “welcomes” more than 1.5 million Syrians who have had to flee an ongoing war of fourteen years. The humanitarian confinement of exiles is particularly acute in the city of Beirut, where the logics of restriction, absorption, urban dispersion and time dilation operate effectively, even outside the camps.

14Amal Khaleefa and Valentina Napolitano also examine the humanitarian management of Syrian exiles, but in another national context, that of Jordan, and from inside one of the world’s largest camps: Zaatari. Established some ten years ago by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Jordanian government, this camp is the scene of security policies in which the control of daily mobility is combined with major inequalities in access to work and assistance. The authors show how humanitarian actors translate the notion of “vulnerability” associated with refugees and analyze the dynamics of both dependence and contestation at play in this arena.

15The dependency of exiles is at the heart of research into the European deployment of humanitarian confinement. Situating the latter within the broader framework of a “humanitarization of migration policies” and asylum policies, Simone Di Cecco analyzes the policies of distribution, dispersion and reification of asylum seekers that are developing in the Italian reception system. Articulating the ethnography of humanitarian confinement in Italian accommodation centers with Sayad’s research into the housing of immigrants in France, he analyzes the modalities and effects of asylum-seekers’ resistance and flight. Engaged in an ethnography of the dependency of exiles in France, Maxime Christophe examines the treatment of migrants following the police evacuation of their camps in Paris ̶ that is, the emergency accommodation and re-circulation to which they are subjected ̶ through the novel study of sorting and transit structures: the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES). Exploring the links between authorized mobility and precarious administrative status, it reveals the tightening of control procedures for foreigners since 2015, the deprivation of autonomous means of subsistence and the organization of state assistance provided under conditions.

16The article “You must work with us” moves away from the study of dependency produced by humanitarian camp government and instead investigates the mechanisms of empowerment for refugee women at work in anti-gender violence programs in a UNHCR camp. From the Nyarugusu camp in Tanzania, Aditi Surie von Czechowski shows how policies initially thought to protect “human rights” and prevent gender-based violence effectively reify ”cultures” ̶ in this case, those of the Democratic Republic of Congo  ̶ transforming women’s empowerment into moral self-reform. These programs mobilize humanitarian (human rights) and feminist (empowerment) registers in ways that channel Congolese refugee women seeking help into bureaucratic loops and, paradoxically, make them solely responsible for their safety in the camp.

17An overall look at the contributions in this dossier allows us to return to certain points, which constitute openings for studies on the multiple forms of humanitarian confinement.

18First of all, the different analyzed contexts call for closer dialogue between work on humanitarian government in the global South and research on migration and asylum policies in Europe. For the latter, it would be particularly fruitful to revive the (classic, but still relevant) critiques of humanitarianism developed by the first, in order to move beyond scientific and political postures that are very close to humanitarian ideology. Indeed, we sometimes observe the penetration of “humanitarian impulses” within European work in the anthropology and sociology of migration, and even more so since the “migration crises” of the 2010s (Cabot, 2019). These studies often advocate the defense of the right to asylum and humanitarian operations, presenting them as a moral and political imperative, an emergency in the face of the murderous tendencies of contemporary migration policies. While it is essential not to minimize this tragic reality, we believe it is still important to conduct a detailed critique of humanitarian confinement in all its manifestations, even those considered virtuous and “genuinely” interested in the social reintegration of its recipients, without limiting ourselves to the most extreme cases of segregation camps (see Simone Di Cecco’s contribution in this dossier).