Ethics and War in the 21st Century

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations, LSE and Visiting Professor at the Staff College, Oslo. He is the author of many books on war, most recently ‘The Warrior Ethos’ (Routledge 2007). He is a former NATO Fellow.

"In an eminently readable and historically informed narrative, Coker demonstrates that we have rules of war, not because we are nice but because we are sensible. These rules are hard to apply to novel situations like the struggle against terrorism, but failure to do so almost inevitably makes victory more elusive and costlier. Statesmen, soldiers, diplomats, scholars, and anyone concerned with the problem of war and ethics, will find this an informative, provocative and helpful book." Richard Ned Lebow, Dartmouth College, USA

• 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 Asimov’s 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 What’s he to Hecuba? 8. The Heuristics of Fear