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"This book focuses on the ECOWAS Commission, both as an autonomous actor, as well as a policy-making nexus for its member states in Africa, and external actors. Drawing from a variety of never-before analyzed sources, unpublished internal documents and over 120 interviews with staff from the ECOWAS Commission, its member states, and external actors supporting the organization, this book presents a comprehensive portrait of ECOWAS's institutional capabilities, challenges, and reforms. It utilizes a policy studies approach focusing on the areas of political affairs, peace, and regional security, as well as trade and customs to illustrate concrete cases of policy making by the Commission, its member states, and external actors. In doing so, the book provides practice-oriented insights into the policy-making agency within the organization, arguing for the significance of the ECOWAS Commission as an actor. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of West Africa and its international relations, comparative regionalism, international organization studies, development studies, policy-making, peace and conflict studies, governance and more broadly to African politics and international relations"--

Modern political communities and committed to two competing moral principles. The first holds that fellow-citizens or co-nationals have special rights and deserve special consideration. The second maintains that each member of the human race deserves equal respect. As a consequence, political communities have to reconcile their duties to promote the interests of citizens with their obligations to the remainder of the human race. This article asks how political communities should understand their responsibilities to outsiders. Particular emphasis is placed on the duty not to harm outsiders and not to benefit from the harm that befalls other peoples. It is argued that an ethical foreign policy based on the `no harm' principle is one way in which communities can reconcile their duties to fellow citizens and their obligations to distant strangers. This is one way in which peoples can retain their separate identities while shouldering the responsibility of building a worldwide moral community.

Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline. Conversely, sociology plays a very limited role in IR, particularly in the large, mostly US-based mainstream. Even when IR scholars take ideas and theories from sociology, they are neither particularly interested in this fact nor capable of recognizing the significance of sociology for the history of the discipline as a whole, being as they are generally uninterested in intellectual history, as discussed in the first section. Despite the difficulty that the scarcity of relevant literature represents, in section two we identify some occasionally important traces of social theory on the IR mainstream, which encompasses both a neorealist and a neoliberal paradigm. By contrast, sociology is intrinsic to most IR scholarship outside the mainstream, which is considered here to be part of a third " reflectivist " paradigm, examined in the third section. Here the focus is set on the sociological elements identifiable in IR constructivism, Marxism, and critical theory, as well as in some European national traditions of inquiry. The conclusion buttresses these arguments with some empirical evidence and makes suggestions for further research. Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline 1. A small, but telling piece of evidence on sociologists' lack of interest in IR is the absence of an article on this subject in the fifteen-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Sills 1968). The successor edition, extended to twenty-six volumes, included only two entries on IR and a few more on area studies (Smelser and Balter 2001); the most recent edition ignored IR altogether, containing not a single entry on the discipline, but included area studies (Wright 2015). This evidence suggests not only that sociologists' ignorance of IR is widespread but also that it has remained fairly constant across time. At least some IR scholars ...