“What does ethics have to do with international affairs?” It is the somewhat incredulous attitude behind this question that the journal’s founding editor, Robert J. Meyers, set out to counter when Ethics & International Affairs was launched in 1987.Footnote 1 The answer to the question, quite simply, is that ethics has everything to do with international affairs. All policy decisions are made within value systems both personal and structural. The problem identified by Meyers was that this usually goes unnoticed. Thus, the project of the journal was to stake out distinct territory in the intellectual landscape of international relations and foreign policy, with the goal of shining light on the often “well-concealed” ethical principles that underpin the actions of government leaders, policymakers, and militaries.
Over the following decades, the journal cultivated a community of authors intent on answering Meyers’s call, and the archives of EIA are now home to a trove of content examining such topics as the ethics of humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, climate change, the war on terror, and the rise of drone warfare, to name but a few. The topics covered in that first issue of the journal are unsurprisingly a reflection of the time. The Cold War provided the backdrop for the featured collection of essays on “Superpower Ethics,” led off by Joseph Nye Jr., in which contributors considered the dynamics between the United States and the Soviet Union, the view from the “Third World,” and the global balance of power. While the topics reflect the era, the wisdom of the arguments is as relevant today as it ever was. In his contribution to the collection, Nye reminds us:
Utter necessity is rare in foreign policy. There usually are choices, and where there is a choice, values come into play. To pretend not to choose is merely a disguised form of choice. The statesman who says, “I had no choice,” usually did have [sic], albeit unpleasant. Clarity and honesty in moral reasoning require difficult consideration of proportionality in the weighing of competing moral claims along all dimensions, not seizing easy one-dimensional rationalizations that let the ends always justify the means.Footnote 2
It is those choices and those values that have been and continue to be explored in the pages of Ethics & International Affairs. As the journal embarks on its 40th volume, it is worth pausing to reflect on the mission and the work of the publication.
A Clarity of Purpose
Much has changed in the geopolitical landscape over the course of forty volumes. For example, in 1987 the editors certainly could not have foreseen the technological developments that are now front and center in both public and political discourse: first among them, the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence, from venues in our everyday lives to decisions of life and death in warfare. Climate change has taken on an urgency across all aspects of international affairs. The approach to humanitarian intervention has gone through multiple iterations of philosophical and political support, rejection, and back again. Transnational terrorism, migration patterns, and developments in fintech have all dramatically changed the landscape of global politics. And the list goes on.
What has held steady is the publication’s commitment to Meyers’s charge to put ethics at the center of conversations on international affairs. The central questions with which Ethics & International Affairs sets out to engage have remained largely consistent. These are the questions at the heart of each of the issues name-checked above: What are the foundations of a just global society? How should we balance claims of state sovereignty and security with those of individual rights and the pursuit of the good life? What constitutes the just use of force? What duties do we have toward strangers who are hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away? Are there universal ethical truths?
Over the decades, the journal has followed the model of the Carnegie Council, using ethical pluralism as a guiding light. No one framework or theorist will get us to a perfectly just world, but together, they may bring us closer. In my own work as the editor of the journal, I have come to think of the various ethical and international relations frameworks that we as editors encounter every day as incomplete maps. One can imagine the maps of bygone explorers, fraying at the edges, providing the best picture of the world as they saw it, guiding those who might follow in their footsteps. But each of these maps has limits—a coastline that strays far off course, a rocky outcropping that was missed and would surely sink the next ship—and even outright blank spots: the unknown, “there be dragons.” However, by taking these maps and overlaying them upon one another we begin to get a better picture of what lies ahead. Where one map has blank space, another identifies an archipelago. It is by layering the maps that we can best chart a course.
A Changed Publishing Landscape
It is not only the political world that has changed but the publishing world. When Ethics & International Affairs was founded in 1987, it was an annual print collection distributed to a relatively small network of Carnegie Council subscribers. The articles were commissioned and internally reviewed by the editors, and publication was handled in-house by the Council. This remained the format for well over a decade. In the early 2000s, the journal began to evolve as the editors progressively moved to a quarterly publication schedule in the more traditional academic mold, adopting an external peer review process. Shortly after this transition came collaboration with a third-party publisher, first Wiley-Blackwell and then with the journal’s current home, Cambridge University Press. Working with an external publisher allowed EIA to expand its reach, moving beyond the Carnegie Council’s network of subscribers and onto the shelves of university libraries, and, eventually, into the online databases that became the default mode of research, publishing, and cataloging content. The journal would later expand its content beyond traditional peer-reviewed research articles to include shorter essays, book reviews, and review essays.
Recent years have seen two further significant developments in academic publishing and in the life of EIA. The first is the growing trend to digital-only publications, and the second is the move toward open access.
In 2023, the editors of EIA made the decision to go fully digital. This was driven both by an acknowledgement that our engagement was almost exclusively online and by a desire to reduce the carbon footprint of the journal and of the Carnegie Council. Only two years later, in 2025, EIA made the transition to become a “research open access” journal. This means that all newly published articles, essays, and review essays are freely accessible to anyone in the world, at no cost to the authors of the work. This brought the journal more fully in line with the mission of the Carnegie Council, to serve as an institution of public discourse and learning, allowing students, researchers, and practitioners from across the globe to engage more readily with the work of the journal. As we look to the decades ahead, the editors remain focused on widening EIA’s audience and broadening the community of scholars and practitioners who grapple with the questions of ethics that are at the heart of international affairs.
Marking the 40 th Volume
To mark the decades-spanning work of Ethics & International Affairs, the editors have commissioned a series of essays from authors of some of the most highly cited articles and essays in our archive, which will appear over the four issues of the 40th volume. In these pieces, the authors have been asked to use their earlier work for EIA as a launching pad, to give readers a sense of how the landscape has changed in the intervening years and how we should orient our thinking going forward. Representative of the journal, this series covers a wide range of topics, from climate justice to AI in warfare, and from humanitarian interventions to the legitimacy of global governance institutions. While the essay series serves as a distinct marker of this milestone, it would be a mistake to see the rest of the content in this volume as anything less than worthy of honoring this moment. In addition to the commissioned series, the 40th volume will feature commentary and analysis on the ethics of the Iran war, rich philosophical discussions on sovereign debt, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the principle of neutrality, and democratic backsliding, to name but a few areas of exploration.
The time for ethical inquiry in politics, international affairs, and our personal lives has never been more urgent. The collective challenges facing humanity will not be solved by any one country or any one person. We must lean into the value that ethics provides as a tool, as a map, and as a model for good faith debate and disagreement. It is in this spirit that the editorial team looks ahead to the next decade of Ethics & International Affairs, continuing to provide a space to build community and foster collaboration among those who are wrestling with the most pressing issues of our time. We invite you to join us on this journey as we work together to realize a more just and peaceful future.
