In his new book, Professor Frédéric Ramel invites us to change the way we look at international relations. He identifies benevolence as a neglected concept in International Relations and International Political Theory. He defines it as a moral principle which promotes attention to vulnerability, as well as temperance, kindness, sensibility, and friendship.

Benevolence offers a compass to develop both scientific understanding and political action. Ramel unpacks the concept, analyses its received meanings in different contexts and spells out its practical and ethical implications in detail. Focusing on benevolence means taking into account the dimension of sensibility in international affairs. It is an international practice cultivated both by states and by ordinary individuals, themselves actors in international relations, by societal actors but also by intergovernmental organizations.

Benevolence lies somewhere between power and law. It has a median ethical position on the normative level: neither a call for moral maximalism (which would tip over into a tyranny of benevolence) nor for moral minimalism (which would deny the transformative potential of benevolent figures as a source of exemplarity in the public sphere).