Humanitarian Fiction: Examining the ‘Host’ in Refugee-Receiving Contexts

I interrogate the ‘host’ label within refugee studies, taking into consideration multiple scales of analysis from international rankings of states to individuals and communities. Critically examining who counts as a host – and who counts the hosts – has important implications for practitioners and scholars. Critiques of big picture assessments of ‘host state’ rankings invite scholars to consider how geopolitics shape recognition and erasure, in turn influencing broader understandings of global displacement and reception. The findings also draw from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in Jordan with refugees, citizens and residents. I describe how individuals confront the refugee/host binary in their daily lives. I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction to explain contemporary limitations of the ‘host’ designation. Analogous to the socio-legal examination of ‘legal fiction’, humanitarian fiction recognises that there is a gap between aid-informed knowledge production and empirical contradictions in studies of refugee displacement and reception.