Introduction

Gideon Baker

pp. 1-17

in: Gideon Baker (ed), Hospitality and world politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Long an overlooked concept in their field, hospitality has much to offer students of international relations both analytically and normatively. Analytically, hospitality provides a new framework for understanding many of the challenges in world politics today, from the search for peaceable relations between states to asylum and refugee crises, to the policy of settler societies towards indigenous peoples. Normatively, reflection on hospitality furthers our understanding of the place of the stranger, specifically the welcome of the stranger, in a field that has perhaps been too willing to either discount moral obligations to strangers or to reduce the stranger to that known entity: the future fellow citizen of the world.