Description
This ethnography explores the political quandaries and personal dilemmas that refugee supportersvolunteers and NGO employeesin 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 organizations, 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
