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This text introduces students to the key debates about ethics in international relations theory.

AbstractBy paying attention to love, this article offers a grammatical reading of International Relations' founding grammar of inside/outside as an ethics of encounter. The decision to focus on love is, I suggest, to contend with the possibility that IR may express a lethal politics and ethics. I seek to substantiate this claim through an unsettling reading of neo-Jamesian contributions to the emotional turn. I conclude that the discipline's founding grammar is an 'avoidance of love' and offer a reminder that an alternative way of loving is possible.

The centrality of the national interest to Morgenthau's political realism is well known yet often lamented for its lack of clarity. This article offers a grammatical reading in order to highlight the Platonic and Aristotelian roots of the metaphysical assumptions that inform the national interest in Morgenthau's work and to show that, despite his continuous injunctions against the dangers of utopianism, he fails to escape them himself. Ultimately, his attempts to insulate us against the possibility of totalitarianism leads us back into its violent embrace via a 'mysticism' that defines a role for the nation-state as the embodiment of eternal moral truths and values.

Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)Robin Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights (London: LSE/Routledge, 1997)Peter Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: Critical Essays from the United States and Asia (London: Routledge, 1999)Questions concerning the linkage, or lack of it, between theory and practice are perennial in International Relations (IR). This is particularly acute in the case of studies of universal human rights in world politics. Problems associated with universal human rights are familiar; what are their foundations?, what are their origins?, do they exist in all cultures?, why, when it comes to implementation, do we see such failure and inconsistency across the globe and the persistence of human wrongs?, why does power seem to play such a large role in stifling 'progress'? All these questions appear in one form or another in the books under review here and readers will, perhaps, take comfort from their familiarity as old, difficult friends.

This paper argues that the later Wittgenstein's notion of the autonomy of grammar opens up critical space for thinking about world politics The claim that philosophy should be a 'grammatical investigation' involves considering how particular pictures, as representations of reality, hold us captive. Although the 'deep disquietudes' that are expressed in world politics may have similarities with the depth of a grammatical joke, I will look at a few reasons why we aren't laughing.

This article seeks to explore the question, most starkly posed by Giorgio Agamben, of whether sovereign power can be challenged. By deploying readings of Agamben and Foucault that complement and illuminate each other, we propose that although sovereign power remains globally predominant, it is best considered not as a form of power relation but as a relation of violence. By exploring sovereign power in this way, we argue, alongside Agamben, that challenges to it are available in two modes: first, a refusal to draw lines between forms of life; and, secondly, an assumption of bare life. The availability of these forms of challenge is illustrated by examining practices of lip sewing amongst refugees. In the end, the refusal to draw lines and the assumption of bare life seek to reinstate properly political power relations with their accompanying freedoms and potentialities.

Supplementing the insights of Georgio Agamben with feminist research contributions, this article develops a biopolitical reading of the debate surrounding the "feminization" of the U.S. military. We argue that an examination of the role gender plays in myths of sacrifice reveals that the military is already fully "feminized." Critical engagement with the scripting of Jessica Lynch re-introduces the political to the question of military sacrifice by rendering its impossibility conspicuous.

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