Description
The humanitarian practice of private refugee hosting has long been a largely informal lifeline for forcibly displaced people. Outside, or running alongside, institutional responses from INGOs and governments, sanctuary has often been sought and found in private homes, places of worship and community centres. Within Europe since 2015, more institutionalised forms of private refugee hosting have been on the rise, not least with the establishment of the “Homes for Ukraine” scheme in the UK, widely hailed by politicians and charities as a “model” for the future of refugee response in the UK.
Cutting across all of these forms of private refugee hosting is some kind of conception of the “home”, a largely under-theorised and often ignored concept in IR. However, as critical geographers and feminists have argued, “home” is a contentious material and imaginary space, imbued with power, vulnerability, intimacy, joy, safety and violence. These relations become particularly acute in the context of private refugee hosting.
Drawing on primary and secondary data, this paper seeks to expand the conceptual understanding of what counts as humanitarian space through unpacking the multiple gendered and racialised affective and material relations of the “home” as a humanitarian space. The paper reconfigures “home” in private refugee hosting as a boundary making site where the domestic and international politics of inclusion and exclusion, generosity and violence, and solidarity and conflict play out.
