Can War be Eliminated?, by Christopher Coker

Imagine a book that talks of war, of all wars that have been fought in all of human history. One could be forgiven for assuming that such a volume would run into hundreds of volumes and hundreds of thousands of pages. On the contrary, Christopher Coker’s Can War be Eliminated? is probably the slimmest volume on the shelf on the subject of war. That is because in this book, Coker is not interested in engaging into a conversation about specific wars. He instead speaks of war as a phenomenon in itself, a phenomenon whose military nature is only an aspect and not the core. Additionally, he thinks of war as a phenomenon that is intricately linked to culture, of all civilizations, ever since humans first realized the difference between themselves and other primates. Over six sections, he traces the evolution of war and answers the titular question of the book in the negative.