Abstract

For those researchers interested in Central Eurasia, locals’ hospitality has long ago become proverbial, almost a truism. Perhaps so obviously so that it has gathered only very little direct scholarly attention despite being such a central value to those who live in this region, not to mention to those abovementioned researchers who come to rely on locals’ traditions of welcome. At the same time, the soft power implications of hospitality remain unexplored, particularly in relation to Central Eurasia, despite evidence that this region’s geopolitics are shaped by relational forces of attraction, legitimacy, and influence by both hosts and guests. How then can the hospitality paradigm help analyse how host countries manage the political diversity of guest countries and generate soft power in this central region? This article aims to dialogue with these points through the onto-epistemological nexus of space, hospitality, Central Eurasia, and soft power, by exploring how these four concepts can work hand in hand to further theorise the relational politics that shape the centre of the Eurasian continent. To reach this aim, the paper first theorises or rather spatialises Central Eurasia as a historical, geographic, and geopolitical space of soft power hospitality. The second part then empirically presents and discusses in the interdisciplinary perspective of the local paremiological fund, the broad travel literature (religious missionaries, diplomatic envoys, foreign travellers), international relations, and geopolitics, some of the most salient data of soft power hospitality past and present collected in the region. Synthesized together, these sections will provide a useful analytical tool to map out the dynamic soft power relations and exchanges that take place in this region, and reinforce the epistemic justice, openness and semantic sensitivity called for by the emerging decolonial strand of Central Eurasian studies.