Emergency situations are always interesting for how they reveal the often unquestioned and undertheorised assumptions about what constitutes a 'normal' state of affairs. This article applies this perspective when considering the current possibilities and limitations of multilateral humanitarian action during refugee crises. While humanitarianism is often portrayed as posing a challenge to the codes and practices of state sovereignty, this article argues that framing the refugee phenomenon as a 'humanitarian emergency' works to sustain constitutive practices which stabilise and reproduce statist resolutions to questions of political identity, community, and world order. In contrast to the 'problem solving' approach favoured by conventional refugee studies, this paper seeks to provide a perspective on refugee flows which highlights how refugees actively contest and challenge statist resolutions to ethico-political questions. Here, refugee flows are seen as being intimately connected to ongoing historical struggles over the nature and location of 'political' community and identity.

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