The ethics of hospitality – the welcome of the foreigner – is implied in all moral debate in international relations ranging from questions of asylum to those of humanitarian intervention. Why then has there been so little reflection on hospitality in the study of international relations to date?

Seeking to correct this striking omission, and making an important and original contribution to debates about ethics in international relations in the process, Baker outlines a theory of cosmopolitanism as hospitality which goes beyond existing cosmopolitanisms. He argues that we must understand cosmopolitanism not as the pursuit of a world in which there are no more foreigners but as the welcome of the foreigner. However, though hospitality calls for a welcome, there is always a decision on the welcome to be made. Cosmopolitanism as hospitality is therefore always as much a politics as it is an ethics.

Addressing issues of central concern for those who seek to understand our obligations to strangers, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies, ethics, and political and international theory.

Reviews

‘Derrida said that hospitality is the whole of ethics. Gideon Baker masterfully substantiates this arresting claim by exploring the politics of hospitality from the Homeric age to Levinas and Derrida.’ - Nicholas Onuf, Professor Emeritus, Florida International University, and Professor Associado, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

‘Lucidly written and theoretically sophisticated, Politicising Ethics offers a comprehensive discussion of hospitality in international relations. Baker eschews the extremes of universalism and particularism, as well as the tendency to reduce questions of hospitality to matters of either charity or justice. Instead, he convincingly re-introduces the issues at stake as deeply political in nature, requiring judgments and decisions that e relegated to pre-established principles.’ - Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland

‘Denaturalizing the debased ways in which liberal democracies receive and relate to their strangers, Baker’s book articulates the more hopeful possibility of a ‘politics of the welcome’, one which offers a substantial contestation of the biopolitical logics of modern (in-)hospitality practices.’ - Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland, and author of The Liberal Way of War (Routledge 2009) and The Biopolitics of the War on Terror (Manchester University Press, 2006).

‘From Odysseus to Derrida, from the polis to the cosmopolis, Gideon Baker offers a genuinely stimulating genealogy of hospitality. Equally adept at engaging with contemporary moral and political philosophy as he is at extracting insights from literature, mythology, and the history of political thought, Baker presents...