Contributor(s): Professor Robert Cooper | Robert Cooper joined the Foreign Office in 1970. He served in several posts including Japan and Germany. In 1989 he was appointed Head of the Policy Planning Staff at the Foreign Office. He was later made the UK's Special Representative in Afghanistan, before taking up a post in the European Union in 2002. Here he was responsible to Javier Solana and assisted with the implementation of European strategic, security and defence policy. A well-known public intellectual, he is the author of two influential studies on the modern world: The Post-Modern State and the World Order (2000) and The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Press, 2003). From September 2012 he has been a Visiting Professor in IDEAS at LSE.