Christopher Coker Remembered

I was so sorry to learn of the death of Christopher Coker. He was a former Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (my alma mater). He was still too young to die at the age of 70.

Coker was a prolific scholar of politics, power, and war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And some of you may remember from my talk to SAHAAS https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/the-making-of-war-russia-and-ukraine-revised-text) I drew on his last book, Why War (Hurst, 2021). Malcolm Murfitt wrote of this book, 'Few books have both impressed and depressed me in equal measures as much as this one has done. Christopher Coker’s magnificently researched Why War? is many things, but it isn’t a beach read. It demands your constant attention and rewards you for it. The essence of his argument is that war is, in the words of Thucydides, ‘the human thing’. We humans have been inextricably linked with war from the outset and it is this intimate connection with conflict that makes us human' (Literary Review).

Coker was the author of 27 books, and contributed to numerous areas of international relations, from US foreign policy to the changing nature of war. He was a professor at the LSE for nearly 40 years, where he taught cohorts of awe-struck students. On his retirement, he returned to LSE as Director of LSE Ideas. He twice served as a member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute and was a former NATO Fellow. He had been a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute for Defence Studies in Tokyo, the Rajaratnam School for International Studies Singapore, the Political Science Department at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and the Norwegian and Swedish Defence Colleges.

His sharp intellect and dry sense of humour will be much missed.