ABSTRACT
In this chapter I attempt to understand the ways in which the norms of security and sovereignty are entangled with the aim of learning more about the international ethics of security.1 I shall be primarily interested in an important body of reflections to be found in the history of political thought, particularly the realist thought of Thomas Hobbes, the pluralist ideas of some contemporary Grotians, and the cosmopolitanism of Immanuel Kant. Together these thinkers indicate that security and sovereignty are fundamentally normative subjects, which, in turn, raise several equally important questions about contemporary world affairs. What operative ethics are involved in a claim of security? How should we account for the relationship between the ethics of security and the legal institution of state sovereignty? Are safe and secure social conditions conceivable beyond the territorial control of sovereign states? These questions, and a few others like them, provide a cue to the direction of this chapter.
