Ethics and War in the 21st Century – Christopher Coker
Author: Christopher Coker
Publisher: Routledge
Print Length: 216 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / History
Area: Algeria, Eastern and Central Europe, Germany, Palestine / Israel, The United States of America (USA), Vietnam
Topic: Ethics & Morality, War
This book explores the ethical implications of war in the contemporary world. The author, a leading theorist of warfare, explains why it is of crucial importance that Western countries should continue to apply traditional ethical rules and practices in war, even when engaging with international terrorist groups.
The book uses the work of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty to explain the need to make ethical rules central to the conduct of military operations. Arguing that the question of ethics was re-opened by the ‘War on Terror’, the book then examines America’s post-9/11 redefinition of its own prevailing discourse of war. It ends with a discussion of other key challenges to the ethics of war, such as the rise of private security companies and the use of robots in war. In exploring these issues, this book seeks to place ethics at the centre of debates about the conduct of future warfare. This book will be of great interest to all students of military ethics, war studies, military history and strategic studies in general, and to military colleges in particular.
Table of Contents
Preface
1 The war on terror
A new discourse on war?
Richard Rorty and the ethics of war
Conclusion
2 Etiquettes of atrocity
Etiquettes of atrocity
Why we take prisoners of war
Discourses on war
Keeping to the discourse
The United States and Vietnam
Carl Schmitt and the Theory of the Partisan
Conclusion
3 Changing the discourse
Germany and the Eastern Front 1941–5
Algeria and the guerre revolutionaire
Israel and the intifada
Conclusion
4 A new discourse
Excluding from the discourse on war:
from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib
Is it a war?
A new paradigm?
New wars, new paradigms
Conclusion
5 Grammars of killing
Grammars of killing
Respecting our enemies
Non-lethal weapons
Conclusion
6 The unconditional imperative
Micro-management of the battlefield
Corporate warriors?
Asimov’s children
Conclusion
7 Back to the Greeks
Back to the Greeks?
Simone Weil and The Iliad
Reading Thucydides
What is Hecuba to him?
8 The heuristics of fear
The ambiguity of peace
Towards the future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Christopher Coker is professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He was a NATO Fellow in 1981. He has served two terms on the Council of the Royal United Services Institute. He has advised several Conservative Party think tanks including the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies and the Centre for Policy Studies and helped to draw up the Party’s defence platform in the 1996 European Parliamentary elections. He is a regular lecturer at the Royal College of Defence Studies (London); the NATO Defence College (Rome); the Centre for International Security (Geneva); and the National Institute for Defence Studies (Tokyo). He has spoken at other military institutes in Western Europe, North America, Australia and South-east Asia. He is a serving member of the Washington Strategy Seminar; the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (Cambridge, MA); the Black Sea University Foundation; the Moscow School of Politics; and the LSE Cold War Studies Centre. He is a member of the Council on the 21st Century Trust. He was a visiting fellow of Goodenough College in 2003-4 and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas (United States Programme). He is also President of the Centre for Media and Communications of a Democratic Romania.
Source: https://www.martenscentre.eu/article-author/christopher-coker/
More from Christopher Coker in this library, click here.