Combining insights from critical studies on humanitarianism and scholarly work emphasising everyday practices, this study examines Turkish policing of human mobility at European Union borders in two border cities: Edirne and İzmir. Through a focus on the central understandings, justifications and operational responses by Turkish border officials, the article highlights the intertwinement of care and control as inherent to humanitarianism in the daily governance of mobile populations at Turkey’s western borders. In so doing, the findings draw attention to discursive articulations and practices, while pointing to their moral, emotional and cultural elements. The article advances the literature by underlining the centrality of geography in impacting on the logics and practices of governing mobility within the territory of the nation state. The findings also underscore variations in border practices and the embodiment of humanitarianism between the two border cities under investigation as well as across the country. In addition, the article adds to debates on the emerging spaces of humanitarianism by bringing into focus the operation of humanitarian border policing in Turkey before departure and/or after the unsuccessful attempt of border crossing.

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As a response to the Arab uprisings that started in 2010, the European Union has emphasised, more determinated than ever, the urgency of inclusive and sustainable socio-economic development in the Arab region. The central objective of this article is to understand the nature and operation of European Union support for development following Arab mass movements. More specifically, it examines the European Union's Twinning instrument in Egypt and Tunisia through a neoliberal governmentality framework, with a major focus on visualisations, technologies and subject formation. This approach enables us to observe the application of an agenda through which Twinning intervenes into non-economic domains of governance in the target countries and aims at shaping these spheres by economic rationalities and techniques. By constructing change around local governance capabilities, the Twinning programme acts upon individual skills, institutional arrangements and relationships, deploys benchmarking techniques, and empowers subjects and government behaviour in order to bring conduct to certain economic logics and exercises. The outcome is the rendering of Tunisian and Egyptian socio-economic development open to enterprise-based, calculative and professionalised operations that make local conditions serviceable to neoliberal governing patterns, linkages and practices of business, capital production and investment.

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and nondiscursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.