Apologizing in international relations: Theory of apology

This article deals with the increasing importance of apologizing in international relations in the last three decades. Apologizing has many dimensions depends on who is apologizing and why. However this article discusses the situation in which state apologizes to another state that we called international political apology or diplomatic apology. After touching upon debates on definition of apologizing and dimensions of apology, we claim that there are four dimensions of apology: material or practical, normative, pragmatic, and legal. This article also tries to respond to the question “why states apologize?”. Additionally debates on apologizing and effects of political and legal consequences of apologizing have been pointed out. Finally we discuss impacts of apologizing on International Relations discipline and seek to answer to what extent apologizing bring about theoretical development in IR especially in terms of the question of state rationality.