Within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, millions of people had fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe. People throughout Europe were mobilised into action, and from the outset, the response to the unfolding humanitarian emergency in Ukraine was a complex and often messy web of private and public initiatives. In this article, we focus on the unique British humanitarian response to the greatest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, known as ‘Homes for Ukraine’ (HfU). We develop our argument in three steps. First, we situate HfU within existing scholarship on ‘everyday humanitarianism’ and private refugee hosting in Europe, locating these within longer histories of private humanitarian action. Secondly, we show how HfU shifts the humanitarian space into the private and domestic sphere, a move reliant on particular conceptions of the ‘home’ as a space of sanctuary and safety. Finally, we unpack the gendered and racialised conceptions of the home and humanitarian hospitality more broadly, and how HfU sits within and outside of the broader bordering practices of the United Kingdom’s refugee response.

This article1 explores the messy practice of decolonising a concept through collaborative work between scholars researching together the meaning of everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania. Humanitarianism is typically understood as the state-centric, formal, Northern-driven helping of distant others in crisis. Using the concept of everyday humanitarianism, our article challenges these assumptions in three ways. First, it explores the everyday humanitarian actions of ordinary citizens in times of crisis. Second, it explores these responses in a Southern context. Third, it focuses explicitly on the givers and not only the receivers of humanitarian help. Our work grounds decolonisation in the actual practices of research aimed at theory building as an iterative back-and-forth exchange with particular attention to power, rather than as a transplant of Northern theory on the South, or its opposite. Our first argument is that the objective of collaborative research to capture the local politics of giving and then use these practices to interrogate the theoretical concept of everyday humanitarianism can be decolonising. Second, we argue that the practices of the academic labour that produces knowledge or inductive theory can also be decolonising. Understanding both the challenges and the possibilities of decolonising ‘humanitarianism’ will provide an opportunity to document and thus legitimate the complexity that is inherent in decolonising a discipline.