A turn not taken: Ethics in IR at the millenium

Abstract

In everyday life we often engage in ethical argument about what ought to be done in international affairs; in a rough and ready fashion we engage in normative theory. It is odd then to find that for most of its history, scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR) have seldom explicitly engaged in this kind of theorizing. The reasons for their avoiding it are now well known. Certain developments in the discipline over the past few decades, however, suggest that the discipline might now have taken the normative turn. But has it?