In this interesting and engagingly written book, Jack Amoureux challenges dominant ethical discourses in international relations theory and offers an intriguing alternative based around the concept of ethical reflexivity. The book begins with a very thorough introduction that outlines the theoretical elements of the argument and its case studies. The author then dedicates three chapters to elaborating its theoretical claims before exploring the importance of ethical reflexivity in chapters that examine the issues facing actors involved with, or responding to, the Rwandan genocide, the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation,” and the Obama administration’s deployment of drones for domestic surveillance and military strikes abroad.

Amoureux’s aim is to confront what he sees as the primary question of ethics in IR, that is, how to think and act ethically in circumstances that are complex, contingent, and uncertain, in an era characterized by a relativism that in itself poses significant questions even to the possibility of there being a meaningful study or discussion of ethics in global politics. The author’s answer is to embrace the very absence of foundations that so horrifies other schools of thought. Amoureux eschews the search for universal moral laws (e.g., the deontological approach of Kantian philosophy) and instead proposes a theory of ethics based on the exercise of continuous self-examination, critique, and judgment (p. 22). He describes this ethical reflexivity as a process whereby “thought and action are engaged dialectically, each assessed and modified in view of the other” (p. 4).

In terms of thought, Amoureux identifies four thinkers who inform his discussion of ethical reflexivity: Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Anthony Giddens. Navigating among these four points of his discursive map, Amoureux describes ethical reflexivity as “the dialectic, dialogic, and affective navigation of thought and action coupled with a critical ontology of the self, wherein we investigate our subjectivity and the potential for its transformation as a response to difference, relationship, and epistemological uncertainty” (p. 9; see also pp. 20, 56). Aristotle’s significance lies in his introduction and development of the concept of phronesis. Phronesis is the capability of an agent to make ethical choices in response to particular ethical problems that are unique to those individual circumstances. Rather than being subject to universal rules, ethical decisions in these circumstances are better thought of in terms of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Praiseworthy actions are associated with deliberating agents who possess prudence. Experienced and deliberative, the phronimos is capable of delivering, as far as possible, the conditions for human flourishing. To this Aristotelian base, Amoureux adds concepts drawn from Foucault, Arendt, and Giddens in order to further articulate ethical reflexivity as “a bundle of processes, capacities, attitudes, dispositions and tactics that enact agency in the context of political conditions we find here and now” (p. 55).

The main lesson Amoureux draws from the various methodologies, techniques, and standpoints of Giddens, Arendt, and especially Foucault is that of the importance of agency, which goes a long way to answering his “motivating question,” that is, “whether we can have a practice of ethics if we cannot locate a foundation for knowledge, or, at the very least, if knowledge is complex and contingent.” The type of agency Amoureux envisages is that of the global phronimos, who embodies the reflexive ethos, that is, an “ethos that can stand apart from and criticize institutions, rules, and leaders that may nevertheless be legitimately formed, formulated, and selected” (p. 114).

In terms of action, the three case studies explore, in a historical-critical manner, examples in which ethical reflexivity was and was not employed. In his analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Amoureux contrasts the “thoughtlessness” of those who sought to routinize and normalize the mass murder of Tutsis against the conscious efforts of “[n]ot just ordinary people, but individuals in positions of power [who] sought to leverage their authority and resources to stop the killing” (p. 149). It is the latter who provide a good example of how to engage in the complex “ethical calculus and affective flows” (p. 150) in the most difficult of circumstances. In this particular instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross and its head of delegation, Philippe Gaillard, are singled out by the author for providing exemplary ethical leadership, as, in contrast to the United States and the United Nations, the ICRC refused to abandon its local staff or to betray its ethical mission to help those affected by conflict, even to the extent of putting into question its commitment to neutrality in the context of events occurring on the ground. “[I]ndividuals on the ground,” according to Amoureux, exercised ethical reflexivity as they “redefined, reframed, narrowed, and even rejected the scope of neutrality and impartiality while drawing on other resources for ethical judgment” (p. 166, emphasis in the original).

If the ICRC demonstrated the ethical reflexivity of leadership, the opposition of elements within the Bush administration to “enhanced interrogation” reveals that “the dialectic of thought and action is perhaps possible”; that is, the ethical reflexivity of dissent can be practiced “even in the most stifling of environments” (p. 176). The final case study revolves around the moral courage of Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, who displayed the ethical reflexivity of a “friendly critic” in relation to the use of drones against terrorists. Amoureux does not hesitate to identify Blair as anomalous within an administration that was disingenuous, to say the least, in its use of these weapons. Committed to its legalistic justifications of the utility of drone warfare, the Obama administration missed the opportunity to engage in the sort of ethical auto-critique and dialogue that can identify ethically appropriate, as opposed to morally exculpating, actions.

This is a book that is rich in content and deserving of a wide readership within the discipline of IR. It breaks interesting ground in how to think about ethics that will surely provoke debate. Those who, like Kantians, insist on the sanctity of the moral law may be less enamored of its approach than, for example, those who inhabit the ethical wings of realism, but both would profit from a serious engagement with Amoureux’s work. The primary contribution of the book is its identification of agency and judgment as the key principles of ethics in IR. The author is clear in his stated ambition to offer a political ethics, that is, one that informs action as opposed to one that follows the dictates of any given moral law. As such, he leads international ethics away from deontological and prescriptive approaches that melt in the heat of political conditions to which their rational, if inapt, nature is not best suited. Amoureux is to be particularly congratulated for his successful rehabilitation of the vital concept of phronesis in matters relating to questions of global ethics.

Overall, A Practice of Ethics for Global Politics is a strong addition to the growing literature on ethics in IR that opens up new avenues for research into the ethical theories and practices that predominate in our era. It might serve to usher us into a better, more ethically reflexive global environment based on judgment and not slavish adherence to “the law.”