Christopher Coker

Ethics and war in the 21st century

1. Fighting Terrorism 1.1 A New Discourse on War? 1.2 Richard Rorty and the Ethics of War 2. Etiquettes of Atrocity 2.1 Etiquettes of Atrocity 2.2 Discourses on War 2.3 Keeping the Discourse: The United States and Vietnam 2.4 Carl Schmitt and the Theory of the Partisan 3. Changing the Discourse 3.1 Germany and the Eastern Front 1941-5 3.2 France and Algeria 1955-8 3.3 Israel and the Intifada 3.4 Conclusion 4. A New Discourse? 4.1 The War on Terror - Is it a War? 4.2 Excluding Unlawful Combatants 4.3 Network Warfare 4.4 Networked Ethics 5. Grammars of Killing 5.1 Grammars of Killing 5.2 Respecting our Enemies 5.3 Non-Lethal Weapons 6. The Unconditional Imperative 6.1 Jaspers and the Warrior Ethos 6.2 The Micromanagement of the Battlefield 6.3 Corporate Warriors? 6.4 Asimovs Children 7. Back to the Greeks 7.1 Back to the Greeks? 7.2 Simone Weil and The Iliad 7.3 Thucydides and the Melian Dialogue 7.4 Whats he to Hecuba? 8. The Heuristics of Fear

Twilight of the West

* Introduction * The Birth of The West * The Anglo-American Imagination * The Rise and Decline of Atlanticism * France and the European Vision * The (De)construction of Europe * The (Re)construction of the United States * The Challenge of the Future: The Revaluation of Values * The Axioms of Twilight

Post‐modern war

Post‐modern war has mostly been analysed from the technological point of view. However, although technology is important, irony has appeared as the most striking feature in post‐modern warfare. It is ironic, for example, that currently it is more dangerous to serve in a peacekeeping force than in battle since more soldiers have lost their lives keeping peace than fighting war. Dr Coker also discusses the privatising of war‐fare which again seems to be on the agenda. In the age of total war, all citizens were required to take part in the efforts to win the battle, and the state spent vast quantities on military effort. States have, from being big spenders, become partners of the private and voluntary sectors. This, he argues, is a result of the disappearance of ideologies which has called into question the role of the public sector. What we have ended up with is post‐heroic warfare. The external enemies which were hated during the early part of the 20th century—the bourgeois, the revolutionary, etc.—are no...

Still ‘the human thing’? Technology, human agency and the future of war

Is war beginning to escape human control? Thucydides tells us the war is one of the things that makes us definitively human; but how long will this continue to be the case as our relationship with technology continues to develop? Kenneth Waltz’s book Man, the State and War affords one way of answering that question. So too does Nikolaas Tinbergen’s framework for understanding human behaviour and Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT). The main focus of this article is the extent to which we will diminish or enhance our own agency as human beings, especially when we come to share the planet with an intelligence higher than our own.

A Matter of Honour: Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations

It was Plato who wrote that of all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent. The proposition, though by no means self-evident, is at least thoughtprovoking, and where do we Westerners begin but with Homer? Homer, writes Ned Lebow, might be considered the fi rst theorist of honour and his account in the Iliad is unrivalled in its understanding of this motive and its consequences, benefi cial and destructive, for societies that make it a central value. Honour is the central theme of Lebow’s book – a truly magisterial, insightful and challenging cultural interpretation of international relations. Honour, he adds, has been at the very heart of the relation between states, whether we now think of it as Hobbes’s ‘vanity’, Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’ or America’s Cold War preoccupation with ‘credibility’. Why start with Homer? Because, as Jonathan Gottschall makes clear in one of the most recent studies of the epic – one informed by a judicious blend of anthropology and evolutionary biology – what is really at stake in the Iliad is honour. The poem is characterised by competition between men who value their honour more than anything else (as the key to their status, their wealth and – in the case of women – the continuance of their family line). The seduction of Helen is paradigmatic for that reason. Forget Helen and her beauty. It was Paris who gave the insult that launched a thousand ships. And if we are interested in beginnings then we must go back to the fi rst attempt to theorise honour – to Plato (is Western philosophy, asked Alfred Whitehead, not merely a series of footnotes to Plato?; less well know is Schopenhauer’s claim that Western philosophy involved a dialogue between Plato and Kant). For Lebow, too, Plato provides the philosophical foundation of his paradigm – the fi rst attempt to theorise about the spirit and its relationship to political order. And Plato, of course, was deeply infl uenced by Homer. Lebow uses the Iliad to construct a Weberian idealtype honour society, a template which he uses to study several real societies in history (as the principal story of international relations) in which honour and/or standing were the key state goals. Lebow begins with the premise that people, individually and collectively, seek self-esteem (as Nietzsche insists, we are all value-esteemers). In terms of self-worth, people feel good about themselves, happier about life and more confi dent in their ability to confront its main challenges. Statesmen with low self-esteem (such as Stalin, Hitler and, in Lebow’s opinion, George W. Bush) are dangerous. It is not the ‘lean men’ whom we have around us who are the real danger, but those who have little self-regard. We are, after all, the only species that recognises itself when looking into a mirror. But we are also, as Nietzsche says, the beast with red cheeks – the only creature that can blush when it does so.

Targeting in Context

This essay discusses three aspects of the targeting challenge from the time of the ancient Greeks: the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘how’. With respect to the first, we would appear to have broken with past convention and adopted a policy of targeted killings of enemy commanders or political leaders. We have done so in response to a demand of the hour made possible by technology —the need to manage risks . Targeting has become a risk management exercise in all but name. With regard to the second, we are trying to be more precise when aiming at the centre of gravity and to reduce collateral damage to a minimum. We are trying, in a word, to be more ‘humane ’. And with respect to the last, technology now allows us to target from a distance without endangering military personnel, at the risk, however, of producing a problem never before encountered in war: dissociation.

Europe, Russia and the World of Magical Realism

In the 1960s a new term entered the world of literary fiction: magical realism. It described the works of certain Latin American writers and had a very specific meaning that made it useful for critics. It was not, as many imagined, a description of escapist literature. The literature concerned was always serious, though it tried to convey the reality of one or several world views that actually exist or have existed. It was a kind of realism, but one different from the realism that most other cultures experience. It told its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world but experience a different reality from the one we call objective. It endeavoured to show the world through other eyes and in allowing the reader to inhabit this other reality so thoroughly, the ‘unreal’ element of the story became frighteningly real long after the novel had been read.

Hickey, J. E. (2012). Precision-guided Munitions and Human Suffering in War

In a passage from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, we find a brief exchange between a Spartan prisoner of war and an Athenian soldier, who asks his captive whether his fellow Spartans, who have chosen so bravely to die rather than surrender the day before had been men of honour. The Spartan replies that a weapon would be worth a great deal if it could distinguish a gallant man from a coward; of course, no weapon can. It was Thucydides who called war “the human thing,” the only definition he was prepared to provide. It is human because it derives its impetus from the social context of the time. Today we usually target people from the third dimension of war—the air. Even today, however, a drone pilot, operating an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) over the skies of Afghanistan does not know when he launches it whether he is killing men who are brave or cowards. The drone pilot, it is true, may share an intimacy with his targets that is unique in history: he can follow his targets to weddings and funerals, and if he is curious, watch them having sex thanks to infra-red cameras. But while a drone pilot may well be able to see more than any pilot has seen before, his breadth of vision does not allow him to see the man within. He might have greater oversight of the battlefield than ever, but this affords him no greater insight into the moral status of the man he has in his sights. James Hickey’s fine study begins with the observation that strategic culture, ways of warfare and technological innovations are social constructs. Different societies will, given the same technologies and circumstances, seek different solutions, based on their values and their prior history. For the United States, one manifestation of this process is the increasing reliance on the use of precision-guided munitions to wage war. Its object is Clausewitzian: to compel the adversary to bend to its will; it is very un-Clausewitzian, however, in using ever-decreasing levels of violence and attendant human suffering. In the best American science tradition Hickey doesn’t really offer a set of concepts, but uses four case studies to examine eleven occasions where force has been used by the United States to further its national interests, sometimes alone, at other times in partnership with other states. What emerges from this study is a positive trend: in many of the cases no unintended

A Low, Dishonest Decade

A states reaction to man-made catastrophe is telling. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US adopted a security paradigm that prioritised pre-emption and dissuasion, nation-building and regime change. But war is a high-risk enterprise: the longer it continues, the more likely it will become the master, not the servant, of policy. In a provocative essay, Christopher Coker examines the real legacy of 9/11.

Book Review: Soeters, J. L. (2005). Ethnic Conflict and Terrorism: The Origins and Dynamics of Civil Wars. London: Routledge

In 1995 the Dutch military witnessed the largest human slaughter in Europe since the Second World War in the Srebrenica Valley (Bosnia). General Mladic arrived in the city in June and immediately separated the men and teenage boys from their families. They drove them away to the countryside where they were systematically killed by killing squads of the kind last seen on the Eastern Front in the German drive into Russia in the summer of 1941. Over the next few days, Mladic’s forces killed 8,000 men of all ages and buried them in mass graves in woods around the city. No wonder for the Dutch peacekeeping force that was in the unhappy position of having to look on, it was a baptism of fire. It was also a rite of passage into the twenty-first century.