ABSTRACT
There is a lively debate in contemporary International Relations on the relationship between our statist obligations to our own political community and our cosmopolitan duties to distant others. From a pure cosmopolitan perspective we inhabit a single ethical space defined by universal moral principles and codes of conduct, in which all individuals have a shared ability to engage in moral reasoning. A key tenet of cosmopolitan thought is the assumption that the same morality applies in domestic and world society and that there is no inside or outside in a universal moral order. From this it follows that our sense of morality cannot be attributed to our membership of political community alone. However, this is a deeply contested position. For pure communitarians moral agents are situated selves and their sense of morality and solidarity is both socially constituted and confined to their co-nationals. The cosmopolitan-communitarian dialogue on the site of ethical obligation is central to debates on global ethics in a post-September 11, 2001 (9/11) world because it enables us to raise questions about the conceptualisation of moral obligation to our fellow human beings. Rather than being confined to the periphery of International Relations scholarship, critical investigations into global ethics have entered the mainstream, with a sizable number of monographs now published in the area (for example, those by Lang, Jr., 2008; Fierke, 2007; Frost, 2008; Coker, 2008; Chandler and Heins, 2007; Sjoberg, 2006; Dower, 2009; Atack, 2005; and Bulley, 2009). This volume aims to contribute to the debate these have generated in two principal ways. First, by combining a range of conceptual, theoretical and substantive material ranging across key issue areas relating to war, ethics and justice in the post-9/11 world. In doing this the volume aims to demonstrate the important linkages between dimensions of International Relations that are all too often treated in isolation from one another – specifically, national military ethics, femininities, masculinities and difference, and the ethics of intelligence in the context of the ‘war on terror’. Second, by addressing both broad themes in International Relations, while also focusing on specific geopolitical considerations related to individual states. Through this the book provides both inside and outside perspectives on International Relations, ranging across national and global security developments. Our aim is to offer a comprehensive macro-micro perspective on the post-9/11
world, one that recognises the specific security and ethical challenges that states, national militaries, soldiers, intelligence agencies and political communities have to confront. In addressing the policies, discourses and practices of the ‘war on terror’, the chapters that follow offer necessary political and historical contexts for thinking about current themes in global politics, incorporating national and global continuities as well as discontinuities by tracing the long-established realist discourses and practices that continue to inform global politics as well as the relatively recent move towards the conduct of ethically minded foreign and security policies.
