Right and Wronged in International Relations : Evolutionary Ethics, Moral Revolutions, and the Nature of Power Politics

Countering the opposing narratives of political amorality and moral progressivism, Rathbun provides a new approach to the place of morality in international politics. This book will appeal to students and scholars of international relations and security studies, especially those interested in normative, psychological and evolutionary approaches.

Brian Rathbun argues against the prevailing wisdom on morality in international relations, both the commonly-held belief that foreign affairs is an amoral realm and the opposing concept of ''norms'', which traces gradual moral progress over the course of time. By focussing on how states respond to being wronged rather than when they do right, Rathbun shows that morality is virtually everywhere in international relations - in the perception of threat, the persistence of conflict, the judgment of domestic audiences, and the articulation of expansionist goals. The inescapability of our moral impulses owes to their evolutionary origins in helping individuals solve recurrent problems in their anarchic environment. Through archival cases studies of German foreign policy, the analysis of enormous corpora of text and surveys of Russian, Chinese and American publics, this book reorients how we think about the role of morality in international relations.