Humanitarianism in the Home

Who is a humanitarian, and where does humanitarianism take place? Focusing on humanitarian responses within the Global South and North, Humanitarianism in the Home critically examines hosting-at-home – that is, people providing shelter in their own home to displaced people – as a widespread yet underexamined and underappreciated response to large-scale displacement.

This book situates hosting-at-home practices and initiatives within a current expansion of private expressions of humanitarian action across a range of global contexts. It situates the home as a key site of humanitarian hospitality and considers the implications of hosting-at-home for humanitarian politics writ large and its relationship to wider dynamics and structures of international relations and global politics. Drawing on feminist and decolonial literature, it grounds this analysis in a theorisation of the interconnections between humanitarianism, home, and hospitality, informing a critical understanding of hosting-at-home as a simultaneously everyday and global practice, in its spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions. Overall, the book sees hosting-at-home as neither a straightforward alternative to the dominant international humanitarian system and attendant structures of power, nor a simple continuation of this. Instead, given the multiplicity of its various expressions, hosting-at-home occupies an ambivalent position within tensions between care and control, and co-optation and solidarity.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of humanitarianism, international relations and politics, and refugee and migration studies. It will be of particular interest to those curious about how humanitarian responses have changed over time, how international organisations as well as ‘ordinary people’ have responded to humanitarian crises historically and in the present, and the politics of welcoming and caring for people displaced within and across borders.