Introducing ‘Hospcareity’: A form of hospitality within war

To engage in hospitality is to enact care. For many, this enactment transcends context-specific action – it embodies a demonstration of hospitality as a “stand-alone concept” representing “fundamental ideas about human interaction” rooted in care as a virtue (Bilgihan et al., 2024, p.2257). Although “the concept of hospitality emerged to protect the needy” (Ocak et al., 2024, p.1), its role in wartime remains largely unexplored. War, an environment saturated with those in need of care, has been described as “the antithesis of care” (Armstrong & Hegarty, 2024, p.32), yet it is precisely in such spaces that care becomes most critical.

With over 110 active armed conflicts globally (Geneva Academy, 2025), this is a pivotal moment to examine how hospitality and care ethics intersect within military contexts (Ajala & Heinecken, 2025). While prior scholarship has considered the relationship between military service and care ethics (e.g., Armstrong & Hegarty, 2024; Held, 2010; Van Baarle & Molendijk, 2021), the role of hospitality as a lens for understanding care in the military remains underdeveloped (Cole et al., 2025).

Building on concepts like hospidarity - defined as “a set of coordinated and supportive actions delivered by tourism business networks to create safe transitional spaces that persists over time” for refugees (Irimias & Miltev, 2025, p.1), we introduce hospicareity, a term emerging from over three years of research with individuals providing hospitality-driven, care-based services in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Our conceptualization is grounded in the lived experiences of military personnel responsible for receiving and caring for returning prisoners of war. Through their stories, we illustrate how hospitality, when centred on care, becomes a transformative social process.
We intentionally place “care” at the literal and conceptual center of “hospitality” to emphasise its inseparability from hospitality, defining hospicareity as “a social practice expressed through acts of care for others and our shared world. It involves creating safe spaces grounded in the moral principles of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness enabling us to live well together”. This draws upon: (1) the ethics of care literature, specifically Tronto’s (1993) definition of care “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible,” and (2) Bilgihan and colleagues (2024) definition of hospitality as “a fundamental social process that is embedded throughout history and modern society with the capacity to affect change at multiple societal levels” (p.2257).

As a starting point for exploring and illustrating this social practice, we describe this phenomenon in in the context of healthcare (caring for those in need), where hospitality research first began (Köseoglu et al., 2021; Ocak et al., 2024). Although hospitality remains a relatively new concept in healthcare research (Zhong et al., 2025, p.334), it is gaining traction (Dubey et al., 2024; Majeed & Kim, 2023). Within military contexts, the enactment of care through hospitality is an underexplored but vital domain (Bakhshi & Efatmaneshnik, 2024). Armstrong and Hegarty (2024) underscore the importance of this inquiry, noting that “the prism of an ethic of care allows exploration of previously overlooked perspectives,” and affirming that care ethics “recognises the obligations soldiers have to each other through valuable bonds of fraternity” (p.39).

By foregrounding hospicareity, we aim to reframe hospitality not as a transactional act but as a deeply embedded virtue capable of fostering connection and resilience in the most hostile environments. We hope this reconceptualization will inspire both scholarly and practical shifts – positioning hospitality as phenomenon with the power to enact transformative social change (Bilgihan et al., 2024).