Migration, Ethics & Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics.

• Author: Sari, Yakup
• Position: Book review

Migration, Ethics & Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics

By Dan Bulley

Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2017, 188 pages, $43, ISBN: 9781473985032.

There are several reasons why people choose to migrate to another country. In addition to economic or socio-cultural motivations, people move or feel forced to move as a result of conflict, rampant human rights violations, and violence. When millions of people migrate to different countries each year at an increasing rate, it is inevitable to think more deeply about, and add more meanings to hospitality ethics. In Migration, Ethics & Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics, Dan Bulley explores how hospitality could be best managed for different types of migrations, examining the various reasons driving these decisions, and exploring the perspectives of countries and international organizations to help build an ethical structure of hospitality.

The author starts by giving important clues about how hospitality should be structured for victims escaping from massacre, and ethical ways of providing space to those who are able to cross a border and seek asylum. Hotel Rwanda and Welcome to Sarajevo are two well chosen films to advise those countries that have an immense capacity and resources to host a significant number of guests who would otherwise face violence in their home countries, and to expose the hypocracy of refusals to provide space to these people while paying lip service to hospitality as an ethical good. Lack of hospitality is a very acute problem in today's world, and it will keep expanding if not confronted. While discussing the third movie mentioned in the book, Ararat, the author unilaterally looks at the genocide picture from the Armenians' point of view; this section would be stronger if Bulley had paid more attention to the broader perspective of both Turks and Armenians involved in the conflict.

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By the end of 2014, almost 60 million people had to leave their countries to seek hospitality elsewhere (p. 39). Dan Bulley discusses how camps are produced and managed, the security problems that emerge, and moving restrictions for refugees hosted in camp spaces, in the second chapter "Humanitarian Hospitality: Refugee Camps." Speaking in broad terms, he explains the phases from transit pass to the physical conditions of camp spaces according to UN standards. Bulley emphasizes that states are not the only actors to govern camp spaces...