David Easter

David Easter

Dr David Easter is Lecturer in War Studies Online at King’s College London and Academic Director of the online MA programme War in the Modern World.

Location London

Activity

  • Michel and Gregory: this discussion between you is getting very heated and personal and has completely gone off topic. Can I please ask you to focus on the discussion for Week 3 instead.

  • Well, it’s been a great start to the course so far. We’ve had lots of good posts from the learners and some interesting discussions. In this introductory week we wanted to lay the intellectual foundations for the module by defining the nature of war. Lawry argued that fundamentally war is purposive violence, whereby a state or group uses organised force...

  • We also had some lively discussions in the comments on the videos and you’ll be glad to know that many of the points you raised will come up in later weeks of the course. To give you some idea of what is coming next, here are the discussion questions for the next five weeks:
    2) Why is it that some arms races lead to wars but not others?
    3) Is nationalism...

  • Yes Daniel, we do offer a distance learning MA programme called War Studies Online. It's a part time, two year MA programme all taught online, partly by me, Rachel Kerr and David Betz. You can read more about it here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/study/wsonline/index.aspx

  • Sorry Kevin. Thomas Aquinas was put in because we thought that would be an obvious wrong answer. He was an medieval philosopher, mostly known for his arguments for the existence of God, and isn't mentioned in the videos. We thought because of that students would discount him. That assumption was obviously wrong and apologies if that has caused confusion.

  • I wouldn't draw any inferences from the fact that the mentors don't respond to a particular post on the forums. There are thousands of learners taking the course and hundreds of posts every week, so it is impossible for them to answer everyone. In this case, several other learners made the same point as Timothy so I looked at this in my e-mail on Friday. We...

  • But these are all points very much up for debate and they go back to my point about coding in the second video lecture. I’d be interested in what you and the other learners think about this.

  • .An unknown number of civilians died as well. That’s more than many better known wars since 1945, such as the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War or the Falklands War.
    You raise an important point about where we draw the line in defining a liberal democracy. The mentors earlier on posted up definitions of a liberal democracy but certain specifics are still...

  • Well, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany were based upon different ideologies but they were both totalitarian dictatorships with a lot of functional similarities. That was the identity I was trying to bring out. But if you don’t accept that, there are other, more recent examples of authoritarian states fighting wars against each other. Ethiopia and...

  • Peter - I didn’t say in the video that there ‘were no wars within the communist countries’. In fact, I said the complete opposite. On the video and in the pdf transcript I say ‘Communist states even fought one other during the Cold War.’

    I wouldn’t classify Soviet repression of the Prague Spring and the Polish military crackdown on Solidarity as wars...

  • Futurelearn have confirmed that the e-mail was sent out on Monday so I'm not sure what has happened here Diego.

  • It should have been sent out Diego - I certainly wrote it - but we'll check if Futurelearn have sent it to learners yet. Sebastiano posted up the answers to three questions on Sunday in the Ask the Educators section. If you chose the 'everyone' view of the Ask the Educators' comments and scroll down the page you should find Sebastiano's messages.

  • Swearing isn't allowed on the forum and Futurelearn moderators will normally delete messages which contain swearing. It's fine to disagree with the theories though and argue against them. Indeed we would encourage this, If you want to argue that criminality is a better explanation than nationalism or balance of power for the situation in Ukraine and wars since...

  • Well yes, we do see religion as having been a cause of war. Indeed, one of the bloodiest wars in history, the Taiping Rebellion in China from 1850 to 1864, was a revolt against the Manchu emperor led by a man, Hong Xiuquan, who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and entrusted with a mission to spread his version of Christianity. But as this is...

  • I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of this section Nick. It's not intended that the educators answer here all the questions put forward by the learners. There isn't enough time for them to do that. Instead we've asked the learners to suggest questions and to 'like' the ones that they want answered. On Friday we'll then take three of the most...

  • I actually said 'Balkans' rather than 'Falklands' and I was thinking about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which Natasha will talk about in her lectures. But certainly the Argentinian decision to invade the Falklands does seem to have been influenced by nationalism and irredentism, everyone's favourite word from week 1. But we'll have plenty of...

  • No problem Peter. The point you made was a good one and it is something we will explore next week.

  • I think you misheard me Peter. I said Professor Maiolo will examine whether arms races inevitably lead to war. It wasn't a claim that arms races do inevitably lead to war. You'll be able to see Professor Maiolo's take on this point next week.