scholarly journals Reimagining Islamic Ethics in Contemporary International Relations

ICR Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-421
Author(s):  
Ahmad Badri Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Ethical Guidelines ◽  
Islamic Ethics ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Turkish Government

The deplorable plight of Rohingya Muslim boat refugees who have been refused entry by their neighboring Muslim countries was a disheartening episode for the ummah. The subsequent involvement of the Turkish government in dispatching ships of the Turkish Armed Forces to rescue the refugees has reopened the discourse on the necessity for a confederation of Muslim nation-states acting in concert within the global context as an operative framework of Islamic ethics in international relations. The episode invites Muslims to rethink the role of their own religious tradition in providing relevant ethical guidelines for international affairs that simultaneously address the reality of the modern nation-state.

Humanitarian Intervention: An Overview of the Ethical Issues

1998 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The U.S ◽  
The Way

The capacity to focus on the issue of humanitarian intervention represents what Joel Rosenthal has noted as the maturation of the field of ethics and international affairs. If nothing else, the debate surrounding this vexed issue has demonstrated that we have left behind the so-called oxymoron problem: there is no reason now to be defensive about bracketing the terms “ethics” and “international relations.” One can hardly talk about Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, or any cases of possible outside intervention, without recognizing from the very beginning that ethical dilemmas abound in the way we define our goals, our interests, and the means we use to pursue them. Even Samuel P. Huntington, not usually known to be a moralist, has asserted that “it is morally unjustifiable and politically indefensible that members of the [U.S.] armed forces should be killed to prevent Somalis from killing one another.” Whether or not one agrees with that assertion (I do not), one may note that Huntington speaks in terms of moral justification and regards his view of morality to be, in effect, self-evidently true. Thus even archrealists invoke morality in urging their preferred policies.The discussion in this essay proceeds in three unequal stages. First, I present a brief and oversimple sketch of the objective and subjective changes in the broader milieu of international relations as they relate to humanitarian intervention. Second, and more substantially, I survey and analyze the arguments justifying or opposing the notion of humanitarian intervention from realist and liberal perspectives. Finally, I offer the beginnings of my own argument and consider the enormous difficulties of undertaking humanitarian intervention with any degree of effectiveness and consistency.

The Role of International Organization: Limits and Possibilities

1956 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
International Organization ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
World Community ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Foreign Policies

No field of study is more slippery than international relations. The student of government has a clear frame of reference: the state within which occur the developments which he examines. The student of international relations, unhappily, oscillates between the assumption of a world community which does not exist, except as an ideal, and the various units whose decisions and connections form the pattern of world politics—mainly, the nation-states. International organizations therefore tend to be considered either as the first institutions of a world in search of its constitution or as instruments of foreign policies. The scholar who follows the first approach usually blames, correctly enough, the nation-states for the failures of the organization; but he rarely indicates the means which could be used to bring the realities of world society into line with his ideal. The scholar who takes the second approach stresses, accurately enough, how limited the autonomy of international organizations has been and how little they have contributed to the achievement of their objectives; but because he does not discuss his fundamental assumption—the permanence of the nation-state's driving role in world politics—he reaches somewhat too easily the conclusion that the only prospect in international affairs is more of the same.

scholarly journals Re-Defining Borders Online: Russia’s Strategic Narrative on Internet Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Litvinenko
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Internet Governance ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Strategic Narratives ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
National Governments

Over the past decades, internet governance has developed in a tug-of-war between the democratic, transnational nature of the web, and attempts by national governments to put cyberspace under control. Recently, the idea of digital sovereignty has started to increasingly gain more supporters among nation states. This article is a case study on the Russian concept of a “sovereign internet.” In 2019, the so-called law on sustainable internet marked a new milestone in the development of RuNet. Drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, I reconstruct Russia’s strategic narrative on internet sovereignty and its evolution over time. I identify the main factors that have shaped the Russian concept of sovereignty, including domestic politics, the economy, international relations, and the historical trajectory of the Russian segment of the internet. The article places the Russian case in a global context and discusses the importance of strategic narratives of digital sovereignty for the future of internet governance.

scholarly journals Why declare independence? Observing, believing, and performing the ritual

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lucas Knotter
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Community ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
State Recognition ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Ritual Theory ◽  
New Space

Abstract Declarations of independence continue to be commonplace in international affairs, yet their efficacy as means towards statehood remains disputed in traditional international legal and political thinking and conduct. Consequently, recent scholarship on state recognition and emerging statehood suggests that the international persistence of such declarations should be understood in the context of broader international processes, narratives, and assemblages of state creation. Such suggestions, however, risk reifying declarations’ effectiveness more in relation to international structure(s) than to independence movement's own agency. This article, therefore, calls for a reframing of declarations of independence as a ritual in international relations. It argues that participating in the international ritual of independence declaration forms an attempt to ‘fuse’ the movement's political practice with international recognition, serves to express an internal belief in ‘redemption’ through the ‘ascension’ into the ‘celestial’ existence of recognised statehood, and offers an opportunity to internally bolster political community through political performance. Ritual theory, thus, uncovers how the global persistence of independence declarations cannot be explained merely through discrete oppositions of non-recognition versus recognition, belief versus reality, and/or non-state versus state community, and instead opens up new space for understanding the contradictions characterising the international political (in)significance and persistence of statehood declarations.

International ethics and international law

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Nardin
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
International Ethics ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Ethical Significance

In this paper I am going to argue a familiar but still controversial thesis about the relation between international ethics and international law, which I would sum up in the following list of propositions:First, international law is a source as well as an object of ethical judgements. The idea of legality or the rule of law is an ethical one, and international law has ethical significance because it gives institutional expression to the rule of law in international relations.Secondly, international law—or, more precisely, the idea of the rule of law in international relations—reflects a rule-oriented rather than outcome-oriented ethic of international affairs. By insisting on the priority of rules over outcomes, this ethic rejects consequentialism in all its forms.

scholarly journals Ethical traps in international relations

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ned Lebow ◽  
Mervyn Frost
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Ethical Violations ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Relative Vulnerability ◽  
At Home

We elaborate a little noticed strategy generally used by weaker actors both in domestic and international politics: the ethical trap. Actors who fall into such traps lose ethical standing and influence at home as well as abroad. We explore the concept of the trap and distinguish it from policy interventions and escalation in which there is no deliberate enticement. We document historical instances of successful ethical trapping both within states and between them. We also discuss traps that were not sprung. We contend that ethical traps have become an increasingly salient feature of contemporary asymmetrical warfare both within states and internationally. We conclude with some propositions about the global practice in which ethical traps are set and the conditions in which they are likely to succeed and some observations about the relative vulnerability of liberal and non-liberal regimes to these traps. This in turn says something important about the practical consequences of ethical violations in international affairs.

scholarly journals O potrzebie rekonstrukcji przestrzeni badawczej w nauce o stosunkach międzynarodowych. Refleksje natury polityczno-normatywnej, systemowej i metaforycznej

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa ŁOŚ-NOWAK
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The Relationship

The world of the 21st century provides an intriguing space for academic reflection, offering new challenges and stimulating new concepts of international relations. In this context there emerges the significant question of the essence and direction of these concepts. They may entail deconstruction followed by a reconstruction of the research space in this field. Astrategy of resetting cannot be excluded here, either. Assuming that reconstruction is the appropriate solution there are significant issues of its scope and direction. If a total reset is considered rational we need to address the issue of what it should involve. This is a difficult question for researchers into international relations because it would mean that the hitherto achievements of this subject are being questioned. The post-positivist approach of numerous researchers, which manifests their response to the positivist methodology in the field of international relations, has not so far produced a unified methodological formula or a relatively coherent theory of international relations. Questions concerning the function of science, the nature of the social world (ontology) and the relationship between knowledge and the world (epistemology) remain open. Therefore, it may be worth going back to M. Wight’s provocative thesis that it is impossible to construct a reasonable theory of international relations, mainly owing to the dichotomy of the two fields of research that – in his opinion – cannot be overcome, namely the dichotomy of the ‘international’ (the realm of external affairs of states) and ‘internal’ (the realm of internal affairs within state), which are mutually exclusive because of their specificity; and once again ask the questions of how sensible the thesis of the dichotomy of both these environments is in a world that is strongly conditioned by the cross-border actors, interdependence and globalization. While the separateness of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ state environments was, for Wight, an important obstacle, making it impossible to construct an academic theory explaining international relations, at the same time the current theory regarding their exclusivity in the context of the internalization of international affairs and the externalization of conditions inside states seems unsustainable. This phenomenon currently allows us to explain the imperative for combining these two environments, overlapping them …breaking down the old, established orders as a result of the now clearly visible phenomena and processes of the ‘internal state’ merging into the ‘international environment’ and vice versa, the disappearance of the traditional functions of borders, the weakening of old institutions and structures for steering the international environment as well as replacing them with entirely new institutions and structures.

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