| Abstract: | Much of the scholarly attention on commitments in international relations (IR) has remained narrowly framed, focusing on how states and other actors make strictly strategic calculations to comply with international norms and/or treaties. The trouble with this rationalist approach is that it oversimplifies the moral basis of commitments. This article offers a deeper analysis of this moral basis as well as the positive ethical values that help to direct and shape the content of the moral commitments of agents in IR. The article argues that the ethical values of sincerity, empathy and sacrifice play a dynamic yet under-studied meta-level role in helping one to interpret and explain the transformative dimensions of moral commitments in IR. The article first develops a meta-level theoretical approach to commitment in international theory and then applies this approach to two particular emergent discourses in international politics: the responsibility to protect and moral criminal accountability. |
