Moral Movements And Foreign Policy

Why do advocacy campaigns succeed in some cases but fail in others? What conditions motivate states to accept commitments championed by principled advocacy movements? Joshua W. Busby sheds light on these core questions through an investigation of four cases - developing-country debt relief, climate change, AIDS, and the International Criminal Court - in the G-7 advanced industrialized countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Drawing on hundreds of interviews with policy practitioners, he employs qualitative, comparative case study methods, including process-tracing and typologies, and develops a framing/gatekeepers argument, emphasizing the ways in which advocacy campaigns use rhetoric to tap into the main cultural currents in the countries where they operate. Busby argues that when values and costs potentially pull in opposing directions, values will win if domestic gatekeepers who are able to block policy change believe that the values at stake are sufficiently important.

Can moral behavior exist in a world of states? Under what conditions? Where if at all, do norms for moral behavior, considerations of right and wrong, fit int the relations between states? Drawing upon many historical examples, Stanley Hoffmann examines the complex questions of whether or not ethical action is possible in international politics and, if it is, what are the obstacles and constraints? Duties Beyond Borders tries to answer these questions and to suggest a course of “ethical politics” based on a pragmatic, realistic approach to international politics.

Most international relations specialists since World War II have assumed that morality plays only the most peripheral role in the making of substantive foreign policy decisions. To show that moral norms can, and do, significantly affect international affairs, Robert McElroy investigates four cases of American foreign policy-making: U.S. food aid to the Soviet Union during the Russian famine of 1921, Nixon's decision to alter U.S. policies on biochemical weapons production in 1969, the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978, and the bombing of Dresden during World War II. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This ground-breaking volume considers the ethical aspects of foreign policy change through five interrelated dimensions: conceptual, security, economic, normative and diplomatic. Defining ethics and what an ethical foreign policy should be is highly contested. The book includes many very different viewpoints to reflect the strong divergence of opinion on such issues as humanitarian intervention, free trade, the doctrine of preemption, political corruption and human rights. The thematic approach provides this volume with a clear organizational structure, giving readers a balanced overview of a number of important conceptual and practical issues central to the ethical analysis of states' conduct and foreign policy making. An impressive group of international scholars and practitioners, including a New Zealand Foreign Minister, a US National Security Advisor, and an ICJ Justice, makes this volume ideally suited to courses on international relations, security studies, ethics and human rights, philosophy, media studies and international law.

Something that has been needed for decades: a leftist foreign policy with a clear moral basis Foreign policy, for leftists, used to be relatively simple. They were for the breakdown of capitalism and its replacement with a centrally planned economy. They were for the workers against the moneyed interests and for colonized peoples against imperial (Western) powers. But these easy substitutes for thought are becoming increasingly difficult. Neo-liberal capitalism is triumphant, and the workers’ movement is in radical decline. National liberation movements have produced new oppressions. A reflexive anti-imperialist politics can turn leftists into apologists for morally abhorrent groups. In Michael Walzer’s view, the left can no longer (in fact, could never) take automatic positions but must proceed from clearly articulated moral principles. In this book, adapted from essays published in Dissent, Walzer asks how leftists should think about the international scene—about humanitarian intervention and world government, about global inequality and religious extremism—in light of a coherent set of underlying political values.

This book describes and analyzes important moral theories as they pertain to international politics and the study of international relations, examining the role that moral thinking actually played in specific cases in American foreign policy.

In this study of an issue that has moved to the forefront of international relations, Luigi Bonanate challenges the realist argument that relations between states are essentially amoral and governed exclusively by considerations of power and self-interest. He argues instead for the possibility of a moral theory of international life and, in doing so, lays a foundation for making moral assessments of international politics.

International Political Theory (IPT) focuses on the point where two fields of study meet - International Relations and Political Theory. It takes from the former a central concern with the 'international' broadly defined; from the latter it takes a broadly normative identity. IPT studies the 'ought' questions that have been ignored or side-lined by the modern study of International Relations and the 'international' dimension that Political Theory has in the past neglected. A central proposition of IPT is that the 'domestic' and the 'international' cannot be treated as self-contained spheres, although this does not preclude states and the states-system from being regarded by some practitioners of IPT as central points of reference. This Handbook provides an authoritative account of the issues, debates, and perspectives in the field, guided by two basic questions concerning its purposes and methods of inquiry. First, how does IPT connect with real world politics? In particular, how does it engage with real world problems, and position itself in relation to the practices of real world politics? And second, following on from this, what is the relationship between IPT and empirical research in international relations? This Handbook showcases the distinctive and valuable contribution of normative inquiry not just for its own sake but also in addressing real world problems. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smit of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by a distinguished pair of specialists in their respective fields. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of the original Reus-Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by a pair of scholars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.