Can War Be Eliminated? (Series: Global Futures)
Author: Christopher Coker
Publisher: Polity Press
Print Length: 120 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Popular Science, Political Science, Social Science, Philosophy
Topic: War, Civil War, Peace, Conflict & Post-Conflict, Armed Conflict, Politics & Power, Geopolitics, Biopolitics, Challenges & Opportunities, Future Scenarios
Throughout history, war seems to have had an iron grip on humanity. In this short book, internationally renowned philosopher of war, Christopher Coker, challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one – peace. War, he argues, is central to the human condition; it is part of the evolutionary inheritance which has allowed us to survive and thrive. New technologies and new geopolitical battles may transform the face and purpose of war in the 21st century, but our capacity for war remains undiminished. The inconvenient truth is that we will not see the end of war until it exhausts its own evolutionary possibilities.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Evolution
2. Culture
3. Technology
4. Geopolitics
5. Peace
6. Humanity
Further Reading
Notes
Christopher Coker (1953-2023) was Director of LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank. His publications include Rebooting Clausewitz (Hurst, 2015), Men at War: what fiction has to tell us about conflict from the Iliad to Catch 22 (Hurst, 2014); The Improbable War: China, the US and the logic of Great Power War (Hurst, 2015); Future War (Polity, 2016), and The Rise of the Civilizational State (Polity, 2019). His most recent book is Why War? (2020). He was Professor of International Relations at LSE, retiring in 2019. He was a former twice serving member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute, a former NATO Fellow and a regular lecturer at Defence Colleges in the UK, US. Rome, Singapore, and Tokyo. He had also been a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute for Defence Studies In Tokyo, the Rajaratnam School for International Studies Singapore, the Political Science Dept in Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Norwegian and Swedish Defence Colleges.
Source: https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/people/coker
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