International relations theory

As the new millennium approached, the journal of the British International Studies Association, Review of International Studies, published a special issue called ‘The Eighty Years’ Crisis’. Referencing E. H. Carr’s most famous book, the special issue sought to survey the discipline’s development over the eighty years since it was first placed in an academic setting. One of the articles in that special issue is Mervyn Frost’s ‘A Turn Not Taken: Ethics and IR at the Millennium’. In that article, Frost takes stock of the role of ethical argument in international relations (IR) theory. He is none too pleased with what he sees. Indeed, Frost concludes that, in the main, IR theorists have yet to engage with normative theory properly so called. ¹ While Frost blames this primarily on the ‘positivist bias in the discipline’, he finds that even scholars who question the ‘fact/value distinction’ still fail to engage in ‘detailed normative theorizing about what ought to be done’. ² While critical theorists believe that so-called ‘facts’ are always constituted by ‘values’, their analyses are still largely ‘descriptivist’. They fail to tackle the question ‘What would it be ethical to do in the circumstances?’ ³