Slovakia has never been a major destination for refugees or migrants and follows a strictly anti-refugee politics. Like other formerly socialist countries in Central Europe which are now EU member states - especially its fellow Visegrád countries Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic - Slovakia fiercely rejected refugee redistribution during the 'long summer of 'migration' in 2015-2016. Meanwhile, the few refugees living in Slovakia face restrictive authorities and deficient support infrastructures. Building on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2019 and focusing on those often-overlooked actors who do support refugees as NGO employees or volunteers, this book provides an empathetic and ethnographically rich account of their everyday efforts to accommodate 'refugees' needs and state 'authorities' expectations.

The book explores those engagements not as negotiation of political or ideological positions, but primarily as emotional and moral practices. It argues that moral codes and emotional templates shape the implementation of refugee support, structuring encounters and clashes between refugees, helpers, and bureaucrats. They generate lasting formal or informal solutions and even inform new policies in refugee care. Closely connected to this observation is a second finding, namely, that moral dilemmas and conflicting emotions often cause more distress and greater complications than the political controversies surrounding the topic. Actors on opposite ends of the political spectrum - like liberal NGO employees and state bureaucrats - experience the same conflicts of conscience and adopt the same indecisiveness.