Political Violence and the Practice of Ethics

Abstract

At the heart of the notion of an ethical foreign policy is the assumption that foreign policy can help deliver liberty and security to all. Yet, as Conor Gearty has argued, in our contemporary ‘neo-democratic’ world, liberty and security are not the universal goods they are often considered to be. Rather they are selectively granted, and curtailed for those considered a threat to the status quo. Where liberty and security are curtailed, this is often in the name of universal freedoms. Using the example of the rendition and secret detention of terror suspects, this paper will explore the role that human rights investigators and litigators have played in exposing the ethical foreign policy myth. The paper will argue that in neo-democracies, human rights organisations are increasingly filling a vacuum left by the compromise between capitalism and democracy in defending the universalism of rights.

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