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Three Reasons for Hospitality: Care for Others, Care for the World, and Care of the Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2020

Abigail Taylor  and
Alexandre Lefebvre Open the ORCID record for Alexandre Lefebvre [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

We seek to answer a deceptively simple question: why do private citizens in liberal democracies offer hospitality to undocumented migrants? Through qualitative interviews with French citizens, we propose three reasons. The first is widely recognized in the scholarly literature: hospitality is offered out of a care and concern for vulnerable and precarious migrants. However, we uncover two additional reasons that are not acknowledged in studies on hospitality. One is the desire by citizens to uphold the basic principles and ideals of their own society (what we call “care for the world”). Another is the desire on the part of citizens themselves to become a different and better kind of person by practicing hospitality (what we call “care of the self”). We provide a multifaceted account of what motivates citizens to offer hospitality even in situations where it is outlawed by their own governments.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 139 - 153
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American PoliticalScience Association

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Footnotes

The authors warmly thank the five anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as Daniel O’Neill and Melanie White, for their very helpful comments

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