Selective Hospitality: Framing the Reception of Ukrainian Refugees across Three National Contexts

The EU reception of Ukrainian refugees displaced by the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 has been lauded as ‘exceptional' in its speed and support, especially as compared to previous migration ‘crises’. This discourse of exceptionality obscures a variety of dynamics, however, including considerable differences between EU Member States, and the key role played by private citizens and initiatives in offering the much lauded ‘hospitality' from which state actors have been largely absent. In this article, we would like to examine critically both the discursive framing as well as the material practices of ‘hospitality' to Ukrainian refugees across three European national contexts by focusing specifically on home-hosting initiatives in the Netherlands, Italy and Poland. In our analysis, we examine both the different scales of hospitality (the ‘where' of reception) as well as different individual motivations for hosting refugees (the ‘why’) across these different contexts, highlighting the importance of both societal orientations as well as wider state-geopolitical positionings.