The Euro–African frontier regime between humanitarian reason and the security imperative

This contribution seeks to explore how the discursive connection between migration and security, which creates categories of migrants and of migration, is produced and reproduced also through border humanitarian action. The concept of vulnerability is explored in order to unveil its performativity in creating a hierarchy among migrants based on deservingness in relation to access to mobility in a safe way and enhancing the biopolitical governmentality of migration. It is our contention that humanitarian action, by often working through a logic of deservingness, can sustain a securitising bordering model that categorises people along different grades of vulnerability, creating a selective filter.