{"id":7231,"date":"2018-04-23T06:18:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-23T06:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7231"},"modified":"2018-04-23T06:18:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T06:18:00","slug":"sustainability-and-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/04\/23\/sustainability-and-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Sustainability and war"},"content":{"rendered":"

I reckon that anyone interested in sustainability needs to be interested (in that academic, enquiring sense) in war. \u00a0After all, war is something humans are quite good at and seem to like. \u00a0We have certainly been indulging in it for a long while now either as conquest or defence of homeland \u2013 or both at the same time. \u00a0War is almost, you might say, sustainable. \u00a0Many seem to think that sustainability implies the absence of war (even of conflict: think lions lying down with lambs); if so, we're in for a long wait.<\/p>\n

With all this, and more, in mind, I read Christopher Coker's article<\/a> in the Spectator on the future of war with particular interest \u2013 and not a little concern. \u00a0Coker is professor of international relations at the LSE. \u00a0Reading his article, and thinking about contemporary conflicts, it seems to me that the future is already with us.<\/p>\n

He began his article with a reminder of Yoko Ono's advert \/ article in the New York Times (New Year's Day 2013). \u00a0This said (in the middle of an otherwise blank page):\u00a0Imagine Peace. \u00a0<\/em>I remember that \u2013 sort of. \u00a0What I didn't know was that the Guardian ran a poll a few days later asking readers whether they thought that the piece would produce world peace. \u00a0An astonishing 33% of respondents said that they thought it would. \u00a0Like the rest of us, they are still waiting.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the credulous fool who was interviewed<\/a> by ITV's Paul Brand on April 16th was amongst them. \u00a0I've got my children to promise that, if I ever start to shout nonsense in public to a TV reporter, they'll quietly lock me away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I reckon that anyone interested in sustainability needs to be interested (in that academic, enquiring sense) in war. \u00a0After all, war is something humans are quite good at and seem to like. \u00a0We have certainly been indulging in it for...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}