Good Concept, Bad Politics? The Heuristic Value of Hospitality

Hospitality as a politics is ambivalent. The power of hosts, expectations of gratefulness and quiescence from guests, the temporariness of hospitality, and the hypocrisy and partiality of welcoming rhetoric raise doubts about the concept's current revival. But hospitality has a heuristic role in migration studies. I reconstruct the main conceptualizations of hospitality to show how it produces useful knowledge across fields. Hospitality helps us evaluate social phenomena such as accommodation of migrants, the quality of welcome against organized hostility, justification of resistance to harsh border enforcement, construction of foreigners as guests, and religious and legal vocabularies of asylum.