Description
What may broadly be conceived of as ‘the Global South’ appears to be incidental to the most influential work on ethics in International Relations. Until now, it has hardly ever been central to this thinking. Michael Walzer’s (1980) arguments that states could be domestically illegitimate, yet still legitimate members of international society appear to foreshadow some of the challenges that Global South states have faced in international affairs, both as subjects of intervention, and as resisters of intervention, among other ethical dilemmas. This paper seeks to outline the challenges for Global South states as ethical actors in international affairs. It also seeks to put forward a sketch of what a ‘Global South ethics’ may look like. The objectives of this paper are thus: To examine ethical identities of states that have hitherto been overlooked in the study of Global Ethics, namely Global South states. To think further about whether the states of the Global South should be conceptualised as ethical actors within an already-existing ethical universe made up of States and Civil Society (Frost, 2009) or whether they should be conceptualised as originators of a distinctly decolonial global ethics (Dunford, 2017); and, to provide examples of Global Ethics in action.
