Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War

This study examines the discursive practices and political strategies that obscured the issues involved in the Gulf region and moved the crisis toward conflict. In particular, it probes the discourse of moral certitude through which the United States and its allies located with Iraq - in unambiguous ethical terms - the responsibility for evil. Seeking neither to exculpate one side nor condemn the other, Campbell offers an alternative narrative of the Gulf conflict. His discussions of Kuwait's border, Iraq's relations with the West, the complex nature of the grievances behind the conflict, the possibilities for non-military resolution of the crisis, the moral turpitude of the participants, and the conduct of the war all serve to challenge the way IR theory has conventionally understood the questions of agency, power, ethics, responsibility and sovereignty. The book concludes with an outline of how a formulation of ethics attuned to the radically interdependent character of world politics would refigure theories of international relations and the practice of foreign policy.