Refugee Support and Moral Practice in Slovakia

This book unravels the emotional tapestry of refugee support in Slovakia and suggests a framework for studying interaction in migration contexts that fuses approaches to emotion and morality.

This ethnography explores the political quandaries and personal dilemmas that refugee supporters — volunteers and NGO employees — in Slovakia face while working with their target group. Operating in a refugee-hostile political and public climate, they navigate scarce or absent refugee care infrastructures and strict supervision by state authorities. Building on extensive participant observation in three different refugee support organisations, the book shows how moral codes and emotional templates shape the implementation of refugee support, structuring encounters and clashes between refugees, helpers, and bureaucrats. The ethnography illustrates how, despite a plenitude of divergent constraints, the actors produce remarkably permanent makeshift solutions for 'good enough' care.

At the same time, it is on the level of personal encounters and clashes that ideological and practical delineations between state and non-state actors, and between refugee-hostile and refugee-friendly positions, become blurred: NGO refugee supporters sometimes converge with state policies in practices of control while state authorities occasionally become deeply invested in providing empathetic care.

The book revisits narratives of illiberal backsliding and xenophobia in Central and Eastern European countries by describing the complicated emergence and perpetuation of refugee-hostile sentiments in an exemplary setting.