Attempts to apply ethical theory to ‘real world’ events in International Relations have differentiated between the individual and the state in determining the problem of ethics within IR. However, what is missing from the domain of international ethics is how what we understand as ‘ethical’ is developed and mediated through political communities and complex discourses of identity and violence within international relations. Just war theory, has tended to treat the problem of violence as a rational dialogue between political subjects within the domain of the territorial state. This paper argues against a rendering of just war theory in these terms, suggesting that the contours of ethics cannot be ontologically reduced to the state as the ‘container’ of moral values. On the contrary, if just war theory is to achieve any critical purchase then it must rethink its rationalist discourse by considering the constitutive dimensions of moral thought within world politics.
