If certainties exist in contemporary international relations then one must be the continued displacement of people. Whether this is caused by extremes of climate, civil wars and uprisings, ‘brain drains’, tourism or a myriad of other possibilities, people will continue to move, voluntarily and otherwise. With this in mind, I argue that spaces of hospitality, spaces where these people are being welcomed, become central to considering the ‘new ethical terrain’ of international relations. Using the work of Derrida, Foucault and political geographers such as Doreen Massey to explore the hallmarks of hospitality – its structural and affective dimensions – we see that a range of spaces are produced through acts of accommodating, securing and providing sanctuary for the displaced and mobile. This paper seeks to draw out how interrogating practices of hospitality helps us to reconfigure the crucial relations between space (or terrain), ethics and power in the contemporary international.
