Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics

A resounding challenge to the entrenched thinking and political inertia of international relations, this collection of essays overturns some basic assumptions about the relationship between ethics and international affairs-and about the very nature of these terms. Rather than pursue the traditional search for overarching, supranational principles, the contributors focus on specific, historically situated encounters. The result is a sustained consideration of the relationship between space, subjectivity, and ethics.

Moral Spaces takes a position “against” theory, ethics, and justice-a position opposing the orthodox renderings of these domains, with their ethical-political effects. The book proceeds from the suspicion that theorizing ethics tends to obscure the contingencies and complexities of the ethical and that striving for the rules and principles of justice generally produces injustice. Instead, the contributors seek to foster the ethical relation in world politics. They investigate the radical entanglement of moral discourses and “spatial imaginaries”-the moral spaces or bounded locations whose inhabitants benefit from ethical inclusion-and question the approach that leads to this entanglement.

These essays stimulate new ways of thinking about what is “international,” about states and their interests, about sovereignty and transborder humanisms, about refugees and immigration, about rescue missions and the death penalty, and about the limited but very solid metaphysical underpinnings of the “international” discourse.

Contributors: William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins U; Michael Dillon, U of Lancaster; Bonnie Honig, Northwestern U; Kate Manzo, U of Newcastle; Richard Maxwell, CUNY; Patricia Molloy, U of Toronto; Daniel Warner, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Switzerland.