The politics of hosting-at-home

This final substantive chapter takes a closer look at the broader politics of hosting-at-home. With a particular view to unpacking a number of binaries – the public/private, the individual/collective, the domestic/international – it analyses the underpinning dimensions and political consequences of this form of everyday humanitarian practice. It explores some core motivations for hosting and the role of governments and international organisations in supporting these, arguing that hosting-at-home is neither straightforwardly a direct 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 the tensions between care and control, between co-optation and solidarity.