Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes

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.

David Chandler, Volker Heins