Moral Courage in Foreign Affairs: Analysing 100 Years of Political Thought and Debate

With increasing polarization of societies and threats to democracy, tools to maintain and strengthen democracy become more important. Moral courage might be one such tool, as it has been defined as the courage of citizens to stand up to defend democratic norms. Alternatively, it has been used to describe politicians who stand up for what they believe is right. In foreign policy, these two definitions of moral courage intersect. Clarifying the understanding of moral courage is crucial for efforts to use moral courage to strengthen democracy and civil society. In this study we explore the usage of moral courage within foreign policy thought and debate over the last 100 years. Analysing all articles published in the magazine Foreign Affairs we found three main themes around moral courage: politics, military politics, and society. Our results support the existence of two different understandings of moral courage as relating to politicians vs to regular citizens. The politics notion appears to be prevalent among the English-speaking world, whereas the society notion is more prevalent in relation to Germany. These systematic differences must be considered in the application of research on moral courage and in future research on the topic.