Editors always have their favourite authors.
The ones who disrupt the most settled of assumptions, dazzle with their elegant phrasing, make you gape or cry. During my eight years running RUSI’s publications department in the 2000s, our team was privileged to work with many superb contributors. But perhaps none elicited awe in the way Christopher Coker did.
On a white board in the tiny editorial office on the top floor of 61 Whitehall, our assistant editors maintained–only half-jokingly–a No Name-Dropping in RUSI Journal list. On it were names of the big historical thinkers that writers on defence and security habitually evoked, like Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu, Xenophon, Thucydides. If any of them were to appear in a submitted manuscript, the instruction on the board was to ‘edit on sight … unless your surname is Coker’. The board was still up on the wall when I left RUSI in early 2010.
Christopher Coker died in Malta on 5 September 2023 at the age of 70. He spent his entire academic career at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), as Professor of International Relations and latterly as Director of LSE IDEAS. Christopher authored nearly 30 books, most notably on the changing face of war and transatlantic relations; gave presentations at countless universities, think tanks and staff colleges; and mentored generations of graduate students, including me.
Over more than four decades, Christopher’s close association with RUSI took many forms: council member (twice); editorial advisor; frequent speaker at RUSI events; and prolific author of books, monographs and articles published by the institute. Remarkably, his first was published when he was just in his mid-twenties. In the RUSI Journal’s December 1979 issue, to which the great English military historian, John Terraine, also contributed, Christopher wrote on South Africa’s strategic importance.
Raised in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Christopher devoted his early scholarship to understanding what the coming end of apartheid in South Africa meant for regional security and US relations with Africa. At the same time, he was also establishing himself as one of the sharpest thinkers on the Atlantic Alliance, the subject of two books he published in the RUSI Defence Studies Series in the 1980s.
A painful physical condition forced Christopher to abruptly stop writing in his late-thirties. It may have been the making of him. During a debilitating bout of repetitive strain injury (RSI), a recurring condition that made his hands feel like they were ‘covered in chalk’, he found himself watching endless television coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the war French philosopher Jean Baudrillard famously claimed ‘never happened’. Christopher’s imagination was also fired by the spectacle and unreality of a war that lulled the West into thinking that it had triumphed–not just over competing armies or values, Christopher argued, but over war itself.
Nothing about the books, monographs or articles Christopher wrote after 1991 could ever be described as conventional. At their best, they were as close to art as IR or War Studies ever get.
Christopher’s incessant doubts about the so-called ‘better angels of our nature’ infused his work. ‘We could, if we wish’, he wrote shortly before his death, ‘tell the story of humanity entirely through the lens of conflict’.Footnote1 War would continue to evolve and shape-shift but, to his mind, always remain with us. Yet the apparent bleakness of his vision was never complete or unqualified. It might surprise those that didn’t know him personally that Christopher thought deeply about solutions. No problem was wholly intractable. On good days, he could imagine a better world.
Christopher Coker speaking on HMS Albion in 2007. Courtesy of Susan Schulman
But technology would not make it so. Beginning with his book Waging War Without Warriors, shortlisted for RUSI’s Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature in 2003, Christopher railed against the tendency to think that ‘advances’ like robots or smart bombs could render war more humane. With technicians and even machines on the front-line, divorced emotionally from the battlefield, we would lose our humanity. Only by staying in touch with our ancestors, by which he meant timeless virtues, could we avoid that fate.
Though Christopher was not a historian, the past was always present in his work. And often poetry, too.
Never more so than in his defence of the traditional ‘warrior ethos’ in our post-heroic age, published in the December 2005 issue of the RUSI Journal. It was written two and half years into the US–UK invasion of Iraq, with the campaign in disarray and coalition troops dying on increasingly tainted grounds. In the piece, ‘The Unhappy Warrior’, Christopher drew on several Hollywood films, Greek and German political philosophers, a few psychoanalysts, two 19th century American poets, one modern fiction writer, and, yes, Clausewitz. In lesser hands, the article would have been an ostentatious muddle. But he weaved those disparate threads into something haunting and unforgettable. Cokerian, you might say.
Many formidable writers and thinkers disappoint at the lectern. Christopher was not one of them. He was a sparkling orator. In 2007, when RUSI hosted Tony Blair aboard HMS Albion, for what was his final speech on defence and security as UK Prime Minister, we called on Christopher to serve as one of two high-profile speakers ‘in-reply’ to the PM. In broad terms, he would represent the Conservative Party perspective, whilst distinguished peace scholar Paul Rogers would offer the Labour Party’s. Both were critical. But Christopher, inimitable as ever, also praised Blair. Somewhat slyly, he explained that the prime minister understood how the US administration saw the world and that the invasion was, consequently, inevitable. Britain would join it to preserve the alliance and moderate American power.
It was serious analysis, laced with sauce. The outgoing prime minister thanked Christopher privately. Blair was grateful to hear some kind words said about him publicly, by then vanishingly rare.
In preparing this short tribute, I reread the last paper that I commissioned Christopher to write for RUSI. Entitled ‘Rebooting the West: The US, Europe and the Future of the Western Alliance’, it is as starkly insightful and prescient as anything Christopher published. In it he warns that the West is in bad shape, confronting a resurgent Russia and an ever-rising China, and therefore it ‘needs new ideas, as well as a new idea of itself. In the face of inevitable wear and tear, no institution can persist for long without renewal and renovation’. The shop-worn ideas of ‘freedom’ and democracy promotion are no longer enough, he argued. Unless the West–one of the most compelling of all ideas–re-grounded itself, Christopher predicted that it ‘may lose purchase on the imagination not only of the rest of the world, but its own citizens at home’.
‘Rebooting the West’ was published in RUSI’s Whitehall Papers series in 2009.
The void left by Christopher’s passing is immense. Perhaps nowhere is the emptiness felt more acutely than amongst his former students–the children he never had–for whom he always made time. For someone so circumspect about human nature, Christopher built more bridges and connected more young scholars around the world than anyone I knew. For someone so conservative in temperament, he managed to forge unique and lasting bonds with students of every background and race, gender and sexuality, faith and culture. He was an unlikely hero. ◼
Christopher Coker, born 1953, died 2023.
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Notes on contributors
Terence McNamee
Terence McNamee was the director of publications and editor of the RUSI Journal from 2002–2010. He is a writer and consultant based in South Africa and a Global Fellow of the Wilson Center, Washington, DC.
Notes
1 Christopher Coker, ‘Debating the Future of War: Change and Continuity After the Invasion of Ukraine’, submitted to Hurst Publishers on 15 July 2023. See <https://www.hurstpublishers.com/debating-the-future-of-war-change-and-continuity-after-the-invasion-of-ukraine/>, accessed 30 October 2023.