Not even Kant would recommend hosting a settler: Harald Bauder, ‘Anti-colonialism and Kantian Hospitality: Towards an Urban Approach’, in Harald Bauder, Mary Boatemaa Setrana (eds), Urban Migrant Inclusion and Refugee Protection, Springer, 2025, pp. 3-16 | settler colonial studies blog

Not even Kant would recommend hosting a settler: Harald Bauder, ‘Anti-colonialism and Kantian Hospitality: Towards an Urban Approach’, in Harald Bauder, Mary Boatemaa Setrana (eds), Urban Migrant Inclusion and Refugee Protection, Springer, 2025, pp. 3-16

11Aug25

Abstract: Immanuel Kant’s idea of hospitality has been highly influential in contemporary migration and refugee studies. In this chapter, I review his idea and the literature that has interpreted it and examine Kant’s motivations for defining the right to hospitality in a way that permits visitation but not long-term settlement. Despite accusations that racism and support for capitalist enterprise shaped Kant’s reasoning of hospitality, I contend that we should take Kant at face value when he wrote that limits to hospitality aim to protect non-European and Indigenous peoples from colonialisation. The state-centrism and Cartesian spatial logic that represent Kant’s idea of hospitality contradict the place-based logic of his anthropological and geographical scholarship. Kant’s attempt to prevent colonialisation thus follows a state-centric and Cartesian spatial logic that is inherently Eurocentric and that continues to permeate migration and refugee scholarship and international institutions such as the United Nations. Not only do the traditional knowledge and governance systems of colonised and Indigenous peoples tend to follow a place-based logic, but—I propose—urban approaches towards migrant inclusion and refugee protection also embrace this place-based logic. I discuss if urban hospitality can therefore offer a non-colonial perspective that escapes Kantian Eurocentrism.

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