The Wolf at the Door: Hospitality and the Outlaw in International Relations

The recent rise of hospitality as a subject of increasing fascination to scholars of the humanities and social sciences2 has been marked by a particular interest in questions related to the treatment of unknown strangers, especially immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees.3 This is not surprising. In the past 20 years, flows of migrants and refugees have ‘affected national politics in an unprecedented manner’.4 Whether by choice or through forced displacement, migrants and asylum seekers arrive as guests in their host countries of residence, placing themselves at the mercy of their host’s hospitality. They are forced, by necessity, to assume that they will be accepted as a migrant or asylum seeker and offered the protection that status affords, to grant their would-be host the benefit of the doubt that they will bring them no harm. Thus, for W. Gunther Plant, ‘Hospitality is a variant of asylum’: it allows the persecuted, the exiled and the victimised to be welcomed as guests rather than simply as individuals exercising their right to asylum.