Moral Obligations and Sovereignty in International Relations
How has contemporary humanitarianism become the dominant framework for how states construct their moral obligations to non-citizens? To answer this question, this book examines the history of humanitarianism in international relations by tracing the relationship between transnational moral obligation and sovereignty from the sixteenth century to the present. Whereas existing studies of humanitarianism examine the diffusion of such norms or their transmission by non-state actors, this volume explicitly links humanitarianism to the broader concept of sovereignty. Rather than only focusing on the expansion of humanitarian norms, it examines how sovereignty both challenges and sets limits on them. Humanitarian norms are shown to act just as much to reinforce the logic of sovereignty as they do to challenge it.
Contemporary humanitarianism is often described in universalist terms, which suggests that humanitarian activity transcends borders in order to provide assistance to those who suffer. In contrast, this book suggests a more counterintuitive and complex understanding of moral obligation, namely that humanitarian discourse not only provides a framework for legitimate humanitarian action, but it also establishes the limits of moral obligation. It will be of great interest to a wide audience of scholars and students in international relations theory, constructivism and norms, and humanitarianism and politics.
Andrea Paras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph. She is a cross-disciplinary international relations scholar whose research contributes to political science, international development studies, history, intercultural studies, and the scholarship of learning and teaching. Her work focuses on understanding how different political actors derive their legitimacy through languages of morality. In addition to studying the history and politics of international humanitarianism, she conducts research on religion and humanitarianism, intercultural studies, and international education.
Global Institutions
Edited by Thomas G. Weiss
The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
and Rorden Wilkinson
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
About the series
The Global Institutions Series provides cutting-edge books about many aspects of what we know as global governance. It emerges from our shared frustrations with the state of available knowledgeelectronic and print-wise, for research and teachingin the area. The series is designed as a resource for those interested in exploring issues of international organization and global governance. And since the first volumes appeared in 2005, we have taken significant strides toward filling conceptual gaps.
The series consists of three related streams distinguished by their blue, red, and green covers. The blue volumes, comprising the majority of the books in the series, provide user-friendly and short (usually no more than 50,000 words) but authoritative guides to major global and regional organizations, as well as key issues in the global governance of security, the environment, human rights, poverty, and humanitarian action among others. The books with red covers are designed to present original research and serve as extended and more specialized treatments of issues pertinent for advancing understanding about global governance. And the volumes with green coversthe most recent departure in the series are comprehensive and accessible accounts of the major theoretical approaches to global governance and international organization. The books in each of the streams are written by experts in the field, ranging from the most senior and respected authors to first-rate scholars at the beginning of their careers. In combination, the three components of the seriesblue, red, and greenserve as key resources for faculty, students, and practitioners alike. The works in the blue and green streams have value as core and complementary readings in courses on, among other things, international organization, global governance, international law, international relations, and international political economy; the red volumes allow further reflection and investigation in these and related areas.
The books in the series also provide a segue-way to the foundation volume that offers the most comprehensive textbook treatment available dealing with all the major issues, approaches, institutions, and actors in contemporary global governanceour editedwork International Organization and Global Governance (2014)a volume to which many of the authors in the series have contributed essays. Understanding global governancepast, present, and futureis far from a finished journey. The books in this series nonetheless represent significant steps toward a better way of conceiving contemporary problems and issues as well as, hopefully, doing something to improve world order. We value the feedback from our readers and their role in helping shape the on-going development of the series. A complete list of titles can be viewed online here: https://www.routledge.com/Global-Institutions/book-series/GI.
The British Media and the Rwandan Genocide (2018)
by John Nathaniel Clarke
The League of Nations (2018)
by M. Patrick Cottrell
Global Governance and China (2018)
edited by Scott Kennedy
Global Business Associations (2019)
by Karsten Ronit
A League of Democracies (2019)
Cosmopolitanism, Consolidation Arguments, and Global Public Goods
by John Davenport
Moral Obligations and Sovereignty in International Relations (2019)
A Genealogy of Humanitarianism
by Andrea Paras
Protecting the Internally Displaced (2019)
Rhetoric and Reality
by Phil Orchard
Accessing and Implementing Human Rights and Justice (2019)
by Kurt Mills and Melissa Labonte
First published 2019
by Routledge
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2019 Andrea Paras
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paras, Andrea, author.
Title: Moral obligations and sovereignty in international relations: a genealogy of humanitarianism / Andrea Paras.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge global institutions series | Includes bibliographical references.
