Brokers in straitjackets: The moral quandaries of refugee support organisations in Slovakia

Abstract

Due to their mediating position between two antagonistic entities, brokers are often attributed a suspicious moral ambiguity, but also autonomy and creativity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in two Slovak refugee support organisations, I examine these assumptions in relation to ʻintegration brokers’. Actors in Slovak refugee care services struggle with accusations of being partisan either to the refugees’ or state authorities’ side. By showing how refugee supporters switch between seemingly opposing moral paradigms, I problematise a popular understanding of the broker as a potent and autonomous agent and focus instead on the process of layering constraints that characterises the in-between.