Christopher Coker

Christopher Coker (28 March 1953 - 5 September 2023) was a British political scientist and philosopher. He wrote 27 single-authored books on war. He was a NATO Fellow in 1981. Between 1982 to 2019, he taught international relations at London School of Economics (LSE). After retiring from his teaching job, Coker was still a director of a think tank of LSE until his passing.

Christopher Coker
2014
Academic work
Main interests	War

Ideas and research

In a 2019 book, Coker investigated how Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin challenge the Weste with ideas of civilizational states.

In a 2021 book, Coker said that war is the result of human nature. Therefore, he believed that human will not see the end of war until it runs out its evolutionary possibilities.

Single-authored books

• Why War? (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• The Rise of the Civilizational State (Polity, 2019)
• Rebooting Clausewitz: 'On War' in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2017)
• The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Continuing Logic of Great Power Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Can War be Eliminated? (Polity, 2014)
• Globalisation and Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century: NATO and the Management of Risk (Routledge, 2014)
• Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us about Conflict, from the Lliad to Catch-22 (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Warrior Geeks: How 21st-century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think about War (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• War in an Age of Risk (Polity, 2013)
• Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg (Columbia University Press, 2010)
• Ethics and War in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2008)
• The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2007)
• The Future War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)
• Empires in Conflict: The Growing Rift between Europe and the United States (Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2003)
• Waging War Without Warriors? The Changing Culture of Military Conflict (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002)
• Humane Warfare: The New Ethics of Postmodern War (Routledge, 2001)
• Twilight of The West (Basic Books, 1998)
• War And The Illiberal Conscience (Avalon Publishing, 1998)
• War and the 20th Century: A Study of War and Modern Consciousness (Brassey's, 1994)
• A Farewell to Arms Control: The Irrelevance of CFE (Alliance Publishers Limited, 1991)
• Reflections on American Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Pinter, 1989)
• British Defence Policy in the 1990s: A Guide to the Defence Debate (Potomac Books, 1987)
• South Africa's Security Dilemmas (Praeger, 1987)
• NATO, the Warsaw Pact and Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 1985)
• The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the New International Economic Order (Praeger, 1984)
• The Future of the Atlantic Alliance (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984)
• US Military Power in the 1980s (Palgrave Macmillan, 1983)