Hospitality in geopolitics and the making of Commonwealth international relations

Abstract

Hospitality is an important part of geopolitical practice. This paper focuses on the welcome given to Commonwealth dignitaries in London, UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and at an intergovernmental conference in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1979, in order to highlight the centrality of hospitality to post-colonial international diplomacy. These examples illuminate four key contributions that a focus on hospitality can make to our understandings of geopolitics more broadly. First, they point to the role of the welcome, hospitality and the host in staging political relations, and to the value of attending to hospitality that is conditional and instrumental in our research. Second, they highlight the need to go beyond the current focus on violence and exclusion in critical geopolitics, by illuminating the role of welcoming performances in a range of geopolitical contexts. Third, they elucidate a different set of spaces – bars, clubs, hotels and tourist sites – that form an integral, but often overlooked, component of political practice. Fourth, drawing on a broad range of literatures, including those around commercial relations, the paper proposes that hospitality – in contrast to dominant conceptualisations as either ethico-political position or embodied, economic and instrumental practice – is better understood as always moving and shifting between these poles. These contributions advance the field of critical geopolitics by highlighting international relations as performance: a conceptualisation that makes space for diplomatic labour, the construction of atmosphere, and the often uneven power relations that such performances embody.