Following the so-called refugee crisis unfolding on the Greek islands in 2015, a multitude of citizen-led agencies emerged to mitigate or contest the EU's policies of securitisation and containment. This dissertation explores the trajectory of one of these initiatives: a Norwegian humanitarian volunteer organisation Dråpen i Havet (A Drop in the Ocean, DiH). Established by a mother-of-five with no prior experience in humanitarian or social work, DiH aspires to "make it easy" for ordinary people

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... to help refugees in Greece, but has undergone a process of partial professionalisation, leading to larger responsibilities inside and outside Greek refugee camps. The organisation also tries to scale up their acts of care and hospitality to the Norwegian state and to influence co-nationals who do not share their humanitarian sensibilities. The dissertation is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and Norway. Chapter 1 discusses the emergence of a new humanitarian geography and the rise of "Fortress Europe." Chapter 2 and 3 trace DiH's trajectory from spontaneous volunteering to "NGOization" and explore the organisation's shifting and contested efforts to "fill humanitarian gaps" on Europe's southern border. Chapters 4 and 5 examine DiH's widespread appeal amongst Norwegian citizens and the organisation's vision of volunteering as a transformative experience. These chapters also explore volunteers' pathways to help refugees in Greece and ambivalent experiences of returning home and negotiating different worlds and relationships. Chapter 6 analyses DiH's political turn and efforts to witness and mobilise for more inclusive asylum policies and positive public orientations towards refugees in Norway. The conclusion discusses the redemptive potential of volunteering. Taken together, the chapters challenge enduring representations of humanitarian actors and volunteers as "rootless cosmopolitans" or "transnationals" motivated by either selfish or altruistic concerns to help distant strangers. Conversely, the diss [...]