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.

Danai Avgeri is a political geographer whose research examines the intersections of racial capitalism, humanitarianism, and mobility governance from the vantage point of Europe’s peripheries. She holds a PhD in Geography from Queen Mary University of London and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews on the HERA-CHANSE project Times in Crisis, Times of Crisis: The Temporalities of Europe in Polycrisis (TiCToC, 2025–2028). She has previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Vienna and has been a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Political Geography.