Utopian thinking requires creative, non-harmful conduct in individual relationships. It imagines socially just practice in institutions and in the manner in which policies are crafted and implemented. These challenges also confront those who derive pleasure by promoting fear, discrimination and brutality. The persistence of cruelty worldwide makes it urgent to respond with humanitarian alternatives. Overcoming the fatalism that nothing can be done is a first task.

Oscar Wilde insisted that a map of the world that did not include utopia was not worth even glancing at, so he challenged his public to consider the ideals of a common humanity. Gary Younge's response to the Oscar Wilde challenge is a vision of a community without border guards, barbed wire, passport control, walls, fences or barriers. But Younge commented, ‘Sadly desperate people are turned away at borders all the time. Others are incarcerated for having the audacity to cross borders we have created, to escape wars we have started, environmental chaos we have contributed to or poverty we have helped create. Others die trying.’

In deliberations about policies towards asylum seekers and refugees, constant reverence for borders becomes an obstacle to conceiving the importance of sanctuary and asking why the powerlessness of millions persists. Fixed borders are an idea of modernity and the nation-state. An humanitarian agenda needs to look beyond the binary of the border and the nation-state.

A common humanity refers to a quality of living, as in the enjoyment of political and economic rights, and to a set of values, as in the acknowledgement of responsibility to care for others. Commitment to ‘humanity’ includes a moral imperative to respect such rights and to live by such values and begins by assessing the ways in which power is exercised.