ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of ethics as it has been identified as relevant to the discipline of international relations (IR) during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. It deals with a brief account of how classical sources have been treated as historical precursors of contemporary thinking on international ethics. The chapter considers the history of ethics in the study of IR in three parts, which reflect standard periodisation in the history of the discipline. First, it examines the place of ethics in IR from the early twentieth century to World War Two (WW2). Second, the chapter looks at international ethics in the Cold War period. Third, it shows how ethics has become institutionalised as a growing subfield in IR in the post-Cold War period. There are standard histories of ethics in philosophy and political theory that identify canonical thinkers and perspectives, usually traced from the ancient Greeks to twentieth-century European thought.
