ABSTRACT
Not so very long ago, there was a time when if you told anybody, including students or scholars of International Relations (IR), that you were writing a book on ethics in world politics the response would quite often be something along the lines of ‘That must be a very short book then!’ The implication was that there was really not much to write about because, in ‘reality’, there was next to no ethics in international political practice to include in such a book ‘almost as if international politics were inevitably – and necessarily – immoral’ and/or because researching ethics was not a legitimate concern of the discipline (Bonanate 1995: 7). Nevertheless, by the 1990s, the interest in ethics within IR was being described as a ‘revival’ (Brown 1988: 213), ‘resurgent’ (Smith 1992), ‘a modest boom’ (Frost 1994: 111) or simply, ‘once again a site of industriousness and vitality’ (Walker 1993: 50). Writing now, this vitality has continued apace.1
