In this carefully constructed and sensitive ethnography, based upon her doctoral dissertation completed in 2021, Eva-Maria Walther engages with the realm of advocacy and assistance undertaken by local actors on behalf of refugees in contemporary Slovakia. The actors in question include the staff of various non-governmental organizations as well as local volunteers who are caught up not only in the lives of those whom they support but who also have to face anti-migrant sentiment, as well as a hostile government. Walther demonstrates the triangular and often tense relationships involving refugees, their supporters, and the Slovak state, embodied in the Migration Office (Migračný úrad). She considers the room for maneuver these supporters have created for themselves, including networks of solidarity against the background of systematic resentment and antagonism towards migrants, as well as all manner of bureaucratic obstacles and constraints. At the same time, she develops an argument that the purported binary division between those who support and those who oppose migration does not correspond to the situation on the ground. She provides intermittent but valuable first-person testimony from refugees, many of them from Iraq. Finally, it is important to note that Walther offers pertinent comments on her own positionality as a privileged German scholar observing others at close quarters.

Three key sites of observation in Nitra form the backbone of this study: Obývačka, Refúgium, and Pomoc a Nádej, enabling Walther to look more closely at those who maintain the momentum of support and daily engagement with refugees. She endeavors to learn something of their background and motivation as well as the meanings they derive from their work. They find work with refugees and with officialdom rewarding but also exhausting and chaotic: the adjective “messy” and the noun “improvisation” recur in her text. She finds that the domestic refugee regime relies heavily on the services provided by these non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with the Slovak state in the form of the Migration Office taking a back seat. The NGOs can never be sure when donations and other funding will run out. In sum, uncertainty prevails in the work of supporters no less than it does in the lives of individual refugees.

Walther is concerned throughout with the encounters between “benefactors” and “recipients,” and the complicated relationships that are entailed. Notable in this respect is the work of social scientists who engage with issues of gift-giving and hospitality, such as anthropologist Liisa Malkki, who has written on “domestic arts of international humanitarianism” (The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism [Durham, NC, 2015]). Walther herself makes a distinctive contribution by discussing the embodied emotions of supporters and the challenge of confronting their own positionality vis-à-vis refugees. Incorporated at each stage of her book are references to the extensive work in anthropology and cultural studies on topics such as hospitality and the gift as well as the social science literature, including studies of the configuration of refugees as “impeccable victims.” The corollary, as she indicates, is that some claimants never attain the status of persons who qualify as worthy of charitable assistance, let alone being accorded formal recognition as refugees.

Refugee Support and Moral Practice does a very good job explaining how efforts to promote “integration” through various social, cultural, economic, and educational initiatives can flounder for all sorts of reasons, not all of them related to the hostile environment but sometimes because they do not meet the wishes of prospective recipients. Some of Walther’s informants point out individual refugees are best placed to understand and respond to what is on offer. Meanwhile, a great deal of effort is expended on simply getting by—something that applies to supporters as well as to refugees.

We learn relatively little about the potentially transformative impact of care on refugees themselves, some of whom “felt overwhelmed by this much attention and charity,” as Walther notes (105). I also wondered whether the NGOs in question were so focused on local challenges that they did not develop any transnational connections. Nevertheless, there is plenty here that will repay the attention of readers who are interested in contemporary Slovak civil society and by extension other Visegrád countries. Her book is a considerable achievement and should be read by anyone interested in European migration and in the crystallization of networks of support and practices of care for migrants and refugees.