Benjamin Boudou will present his new books Le dilemme des frontières : Ethique et politique de l’immigration [The Boundary Dilemma] and Politique de l’hospitalité [Politics of Hospitality]. His talk will examine anti-migration discourses and practices in France and in the US, and advocate for making hospitality a core principle of our democracies.
Benjamin Boudou holds a PhD in political science from the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris. His first book, Hospitality Politics: A Conceptual Genealogy, explores different historical mobilizations of hospitality to show how it has been defined for political purposes, and why public discourse is still oscillating between moral and political concepts when it comes to border politics. He worked as a lecturer in political theory at Sciences Po and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI). He spent a year as a Fox Fellow at Yale University, and earned a postdoctoral visiting fellowship at KU-Leuven (RIPPLE Centre). He is the editor-in-chief of Raisons Politiques, a French peer-reviewed journal of political theory. His current research focuses on contemporary political theories of immigration and methodological nationalism, especially how the principle of affected interests (or all-affected principle) can be a normative and practical resource to democratize the access to political communities.