Why is human movement increasingly conceived of as a logistical problem? Global forms of human movement have been occurring for centuries, but popular discourse and policies often construct contemporary human movement as exceptional: an unprecedented global problem that requires new techniques of management and logistics. Scholarship situates logistics as a site that articulates social relations of power and differentiates human worth. In this paper, we ask how human movement becomes transformed into a logistical matter in the first place. Following calls within critical logistics scholarship to not just follow containers but also techniques like containment, this paper considers mapping techniques that transform human movement into problems viewed through a logistical lens.
We explore these mapping techniques in the context of transnational humanitarian response operations and EU asylum procedures. We find that mapping techniques visibly construct humans on the move as issues of circulation and distribution: a logistical framing which invisibilizes the figure(s) of the human(s) situated in these circulations and distributions. At the same time, we find that mapping techniques both make and unmake human movement because mapping imbues (and is imbued with) ambivalent, ever-changing directional and hierarchical assumptions and logics related to the configuration and organization of social relations. We argue that it is this very differentiation of humanity that logistification – through techniques of mapping – produces and enacts: the value and attention to certain human lives versus others based on logistics.