Description
This paper revisits Alexander Wendt’s claim that states are persons, arguing that while the analogy is conceptually compelling, it remains ontologically and ethically incomplete. Drawing on constructivist and post-structuralist thought, it contends that the personhood of the state cannot be understood apart from its capacity for violence. Like human beings, a state’s moral and legal consciousness does not precede violence but emerges through it. Morality, ethics, and international law therefore function not merely as constraints upon violence, but as discursive frameworks that render it intelligible, legitimate, and, at times, necessary. Through an analysis of contemporary global responses to Ukraine and Gaza, the paper demonstrates how moral narratives selectively humanise or dehumanise states, revealing the performative nature of ethical judgement in international society. By reframing the state as both a moral and violent actor, it argues for a conception of statehood in which morality is contingent upon power and harm, rather than transcendent. This reconceptualisation exposes the uneasy coexistence of violence and virtue at the heart of the modern international order and offers a lens through which to rethink the ethical and political dimensions of state action in a globally contested world.
