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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2020
The year 2020 has been a very trying one for many people, and universities have not been exempted from the challenges it has posed. There are real concerns that the effects of COVID-19 could lead to a lost generation of academic researchers. At the same time, this has been an unusually fecund period for the field of ethics and international affairs. New ideas regarding the relationship between politics and ethics have come to light, with implications for how we think about what ethics actually comprises. This essay seeks to take stock of this moment by considering the contributions to the field made by four recently published books. It concludes that we are observing a trend toward a more expansive way of thinking about ethics, one that has significant implications for how we approach the task of international relations scholarship.
1 O'Callaghan, Ronan, Walzer, Just War and Iraq: Ethics as Response (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frazer, Elizabeth and Hutchings, Kimberly, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2019)Google Scholar; Schwarz, Elke, Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dobos, Ned, Ethics, Security, & the War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 I expand upon these ideas elsewhere: O'Driscoll, Cian, “How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love the Just War Tradition,” in “The Promise and Paradox of Ethical War: A Special Issue on Maja Zehfuss's War and the Politics of Ethics,” special issue, Critical Studies on Security 7, no. 3 (2019), pp. 182–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 I am grateful to the editors of this journal for their advice on this point.
4 Howell, Alison and Richter-Montpetit, Melanie, “Is Securitization Theory Racist? Civilizationism, Methodological Whiteness, and Antiblack Thought in the Copenhagen School,” Security Dialogue 51, no. 1 (February 2020), pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 3.
5 Wæver, Ole and Buzan, Barry, “Racism and Responsibility—The Critical Limits of Deepfake Methodology in Security Studies: A Reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit,” Security Dialogue 51, no. 4 (August 2020), pp. 386–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 This controversy is discussed in detail in episode 9 of the Whiskey & International Relations Theory podcast entitled “Race and Securitization Theory” (podomatic audio, 1:47), www.podomatic.com/podcasts/whiskeyindiaromeo/episodes/2020-05-21T14_58_46-07_00.