In his essay ‘Perpetual peace’, Immanuel Kant (1795) described hospitality as

Kant spoke of hospitality as an ‘eternal peace’, a universal hospitality without limit that we each inhibit by ‘virtue of our common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot indefinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other’. Through our common ownership of the earth, Kant (1795) was arguing that there then is a universal right to hospitality, acting as a tonic for the violence and hostility within the world, leading to a ‘perpetual peace among nations’.

I want to turn this analysis first towards the theory of hospitality, and how this notion can be employed to understand the positioning of the contemporary refugee. Through engaging with hospitality, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida, I want to examine the notion of hospitality, and argue how hospitality is not only (and can only be) conditional, but has been marginalised, with hostility towards the refugee becoming the main driving force of government policies and debates. In short, this is a chapter that focuses on exploring hospitality and draws on Derrida, but it is not a chapter on Derrida. The intention is to engage with Derrida, but go beyond him in order to stretch and develop the concept of hospitality, in the vein of Mireille Rosello (2001), Judith Still (2013) and Dan Bulley (2017).

To do so, I offer an introduction to the concepts of unconditional and conditional hospitality, before focusing more closely on hospitality and the parasitical guest, xenophobia and the politics of hostipitality. The chapter will then conclude by seeking to stretch the term of hospitality to develop a new understanding of hospitality as that of externalised humanitarian hospitality. This is a hospitality that is projected beyond the territory of a state as a means to verify conditionality.