Join us for a discussion about how war and diplomacy have evolved and will continue to do so.

War has evolved for a reason. So has diplomacy. The institution of diplomacy is often understood as the result of interaction between diplomats and politicians themselves: changes are due to more firmly organised cooperation on ever new issues. Less discussed are the environmental factors that induce change, more specifically, the evolutionary idea of tipping points to the pre-history and history of dipomacy. War has evolved as we have – it is inherent in our cultural DNA and it is promising to take us into a new, post-human age. Will war still be what Thucydides once called it: the human thing, or will we humans devolve it to the machines? And what of diplomacy: will we revert to a more Realpolitik diplomacy as a result of the rise of non-Western powers, or will we reach a new tipping-point where multilateral and multi-actor diplomacy will dominate?

Christopher Coker is Director of LSE IDEAS.

Iver Neumann is Director of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. He was the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at LSE between 2012 and 2017. 

Aaron McKeil is a Course Tutor on the MSc International Strategy and Diplomacy programme at LSE IDEAS. He gained his PhD in International Relations from LSE.

Event hashtag: #LSEWar

LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it.