Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Possibilities
Editors: David Chandler and Volker Heins
(London: Routledge, 2007)
Synopsis
This new volume moves beyond the limits of current debate to show how today's foreign policy is increasingly about values rather than interests and why ethics are now playing a central role. Rather than counterposing interests and ethics, trying to find 'hidden agendas' or emphasizing the double-standards at play in ethical foreign policy, this book brings together leading international theorists, and a variety of stimulating approaches, to develop a critical understanding of the rise of ethical foreign policy, and to analyze the limits of ethical policy-making on its own terms. They deal with the limits of 'ethical foreign policy' both in the light of the internal dynamic of these policies themselves, and with regard to the often unintended consequences of policies designed to better the world.
This book also shows how the transformation of both the domestic and the international spheres of politics means that ethics has become a rallying point for non-state actors and experts who gather around values and norms in order to force institutions to justify their behavior. This process results from different structural changes and the transformation of the international system, the individualization of Western societies and the growing importance of expertise in the justification of decisions in risk adverse societies. It leads to a transformation of norms and to a redefinition of a global ethical framework that needs to be clarified. This book will be of great interest to all students and researchers of foreign policy formation, politics and international relations.
Contents
Introduction
1 Ethics and foreign policy: new perspectives on an old problem
Volker Heins and David Chandler
Part 1: Geographies of ethical intervention
2 Neo-Wilsonianism: the limits of American ethical foreign policy
Alex Gourevitch
3 Crusaders and snobs: moralizing foreign policy in Britain and Germany, 1999-2005
Volker Heins
4 Poor man’s ethics? Peacekeeping and the contradictions of ethical ideology
Philip Cunliffe
Part 2: Theoretical issues
5 The ‘West divided’? Bentham and Kant on law and ethics in foreign policy
Peter Niesen
6 European Union, normative power and ethical foreign policy
Ian Manners
7 Moral judgments on international interventions: a Bosnian perspective
Isabelle Delpla
Part 3: Techniques and tactics of ethical intervention
8 The Other-regarding ethics of the ‘empire in denial’
David Chandler
9 Agents of truth and justice: truth commissions and the transitional justice epistemic community
Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch
10 Precision in uncertain times: targeting as a mode of justification of the use of force
Ariel Colonomos
11 Trusteeship and contemporary international society
William Bain
From Amazon: Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy (Routledge Advances in International Relations & Global Politics)
