Democratic Peace

Long neglected as a focus of serious study in International Relations (IR), the concept of trust has recently begun to attract increasing attention. Unfortunately, much of this exciting new work still suffers from a lack of a comprehensive conceptualization of trust and a rigorous and replicable operationalization of this conceptualization. In this paper, I help address this problem by proposing a new definition and conceptualization of trust appropriate to IR founded on research in psychology, economics, and even neurology. This conceptualization holds that trust is the result of a collective identification that occurs when sufficient levels of positive affect and familiarity between agents react and crystallize around a salient commonality. Building on this conceptualization, I identify a number of operationalizable factors capable of generating the familiarity and positive affect required for trust to eventuate and derive some qualitative and quantitative indicators for their measurement. Simultaneously, I tackle to problem of how trust, which can only exist at the level of the individual, comes to influence the behaviour of states. I close the paper by distilling this analysis into a five-step research procedure which can be used as a template for studying trust and its influence on state decision-making in IR.

While Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) has long benefited from a robust debate focused on the empirical validity of its central claim that liberal states tend not to fight one another, this discussion has not translated into an equally vigorous consideration of the internal validity of the causal models proposed to explain this empirical regularity. In this paper, I examine two of the most persuasive explanatory models of the liberal peace, namely those presented by John Owen in his book Liberal Peace, Liberal War and Charles Lipson in his offering Reliable Partners. Based on a careful interrogation of these works and their internal logic, I argue that while quite different in the explanations they offer, both suffer from a similar flaw, namely, that both models implicitly rely on an under-theorized willingness of liberals to trust other liberals for their logical coherence. Having identified this flaw, I proceed to assess the extent to which the assumptions on which these models rest provide the basis for filling this aforementioned trust-shaped hole. In so doing, I engage with the limited scholarship on trust that already exists in IR. Finding neither model – nor existing IR scholarship on trust – capable of accommodating the form of trust needed to support the causal weight placed on it by its’ respective author’s theoretical architecture, I conclude by sketching the outlines of the type of trust required to play this role. In so doing, I mount an argument for re-conceiving DPT so as to include Constructivist and Psychological/Cognitivist insights.

Co-écrit avec Frédérick Guillaume Dufour. Cette entrée passe en revue et analyse les principales contributions à la théorie de la paix démocratique dans le champ des Relations Internationales, notamment ses racines dans le fameux Traité de la paix perpétuelle de Kant, en passant par la tradition libérale et les travaux de Doyle, Owen et Russett, entre autres, tout en notant les critiques qui lui ont été adressées en provenance d'auteurs néo-réalistes et critiques.

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Despite the burgeoning literature dealing with the democratic peace theory, there seems to be surprisingly little research done in actually analyzing how and why democracies cause peace. There is even less research done in empirically analyzing the “how” part of the normative aspects of the democratic peace theory. The purpose of this paper is to explain the theoretical assumptions and how interpersonal trust is linked to a country's preferences to go to war. In addition, a direct comparison is made between democratic and non-democratic states to ascertain more clearly the effect of trust on decisions to go to war. This study quantitatively examines the period from 1980 to 2001 and considers 62 democratic countries and 30 non-democratic countries in their choices to engage in conflict. The research project finds that interpersonal trust is strongly correlated with states’ decisions to go to war.

A few years ago, it was a common complaint that the international dimension of democratization and, in particular, the external promotion of democracy were largely neglected by scholars of comparative politics and international relations. By now, however, this has changed. Academic research has begun to catch up with the growth of foreign and development policies – and an emerging “democracy promotion industry” – explicitly aiming at the international promotion and protection of democratic orders. Yet, what is still a largely unexplored desideratum is the challenge to theoretically grasp “democracy promotion” as aim and strategy of democratic foreign policies, that is to embed the empirical research on democracy promotion in theoretical perspectives on international relations and foreign policy. In this paper, we set out to contribute to filling this gap. We therefore scan IR theories in order to identify the place and the significance of external democracy promotion within the foreign (and development) policies of democratic states. The paper examines, firstly, theoretical approaches to the Democratic Peace and, secondly, different theories of international relations and, more specifically, foreign policy. In both cases, a certain amount of theoretical creativity is unavoidable as existing work on the Democratic Peace, IR theories and foreign policy analysis has, up to now, largely ignored external democracy promotion. We do not aim at presenting a potential theory of external democracy promotion but only at systematizing possible theoretical approaches to this phenomenon.

The paper analyzes why and how Germany has been participating in the Afghan war since 2001. By looking at the official justification of Germany’s civil-military engagement in Afghanistan in parliamentarian debates and, in particular, by the government, we argue – contra mainstream approaches of the Democratic Peace – that the Afghan war represents a “democratic war”, fighting for objectives particular to liberal democracies. We call this an example for the “antinomies of Democratic Peace”. By analyzing the ways in which Germany actually shaped its contribution to the war, we show that German military engagement does not signal the turning away from its postwar political culture usually called “Civilian Power”, but that, in fact, we can only understand the actual German conduct of war, which looks highly incoherent and irrational at the surface, if we interpret it as the outcome of the intense effort to deal with the dilemmas of a “Civilian Power” at war. Thus, we need to look at the antinomies of the Democratic Peace in order to understand why Germany participates in the Afghan war and pay attention to Germany’s specific political culture in order to understand how it does so.

original description by TV3 CCMA: Andreu Ginestet és un mediador per la pau català instal·lat a Alemanya que intervé en alguns dels principals conflictes del món. Hem aprofitat per parlar amb ell de com es veu el procés català a les altres instàncies mundials, del conflicte entre Rússia i Ucraïna, per Ginestet "el que més preocupa en aquest moment", i també s'ha referit a l'organització Estat Islàmic.

Description by Andreu Ginestet: In this film on Catalan State television we concentrate on the Catalonia versus Spain conflict, Ukraine, IS, Iraq and the mesh of conflicts and interests. Conflicts are explained as connected net-works of conflict that are overlaid by networks of interests.

In modern postwar orders (and disorders) the concept of democratic peace prescribes that losing parties remember defeat and accept blame in order to redeem themselves and receive amnesty. In addition, the winning side’s position is to be accepted as rightful, morally just, and inherently peaceable. However, the historian Reinhart Koselleck remarks that throughout history succee- ding postwar transitions were creatively framed through three alternatives: first, noting down what really has happened (documentation); second, embedding war experience into larger his- torical frameworks in order to integrate and minimize the defeat (contextualization); and, third, denying the defeat by rewriting it (annihilation/reinterpretation). But groups who are likely to be defeated are already able to anticipate the modern constrictions on these alternatives during wartime. Our thesis is that the recent limiting of options for postwar arrangements is one key factor for both the emerging permanence of asymmetric, or so-called ‘new wars’, and the multi- tude of notoriously unstable postwar architectures.

Democracies do not take up arms against each other. Although this axiom has attained the status of a mantra in the field of international relations, this statement is much more complex than it appears in part because it is highly contingent on the definitions and operationalizations of both democracy and conflict. This article revisits democratic peace theory, combining both institutional constraints and similarity-based arguments. Interactions between the democratic level of the dyad (the average democratic level of its members) and its democratic spread (difference between the democratic scores of its members) create a dyadic triangle that encompasses all possible combinations of cases, revisiting which dyads are more prone to conflict. The findings partially confirm and partially refute both the institutional constraints and the similarity-based arguments, leading to a nuanced alternative theory: the Interactive Model of Democratic Peace. Akin to democratic peace theory, our evidence shows that the higher a dyad's level of democracy is, the lower the probability of fatal militarized interstate disputes between that pair of states. However, contrary to democratic peace theory, we find that dissimilar-regime dyads can still be peaceful as long as they have a high mean of democracy. Following the theory of regime similarity, we consider the democratic spread of each dyad, but we find that being similar is not a sufficient condition for peace between the members of a dyad. From the empirical evidence, the article derives three heuristic zones of conflict, filling much of the gray area that has been left unexplained by previous models.

While our understanding of the liberal peace phenomenon has progressed considerably since it was first empirically identified, important theoretical gaps remain. Three of the most significant of these gaps concern the nature and impact of the narratives and identities which guide agents’ behaviours; the process by which agents identify other agents with whom they are willing to attempt building the liberal peace; and the question of how states externalize non-violent dispute resolution despite unavoidable and irresolvable uncertainty regarding other states’ intentions. Based on my analysis of these gaps, in this paper I propose some preliminary solutions to the problems which they imply. These solutions include (1) the provision of a clear account of which aspects of liberalism are essential to the liberal peace and of the type of identity required to sustain behaviour along these lines; (2) an attempt at modeling the most significant processes by which liberal agents identify other liberal agents; and (3) the development of a conceptualization of trust between states. Finally, I attempt a first cut at assembling a more comprehensive theory of the liberal peace by integrating these solutions with already existing scholarship concerning the causal mechanisms by which the peace is produced.

Der Beitrag stellt den Ansatz der Antinomien des Demokratischen Friedens und ihre Implikati-onen für die Kriegs- und Demokratieförderpraxis demokratischer Staaten vor und wendet sie auf den offiziellen Diskurs zur deutschen Afghanistanpolitik an. Analysiert werden die Begrün-dungen des zivil-militärischen Engagements in Afghanistan in den Mandatsdebatten im Bun-destag zwischen 2001 und 2011. Im Zentrum stehen drei Fragen: (1) Inwieweit weisen die Be-gründungsmuster den deutschen Militäreinsatz als „demokratischen Krieg“ aus? (2) Wie gehen die Bundesregierungen mit den Problemen und Widersprüchen um, die der praxeologischen Wendung des Demokratischen Friedens in eine aktive Politik gewaltgestützter Demokratieför-derung inhärent sind? (3) Inwieweit entsprechen die Befunde zu beiden Fragen den in der Lite-ratur herausgearbeiteten Besonderheiten deutscher Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik?

The contribution presents the approach of the antinomies of the Democratic Peace and their implications for the conduct of war and democracy promotion by democratic states, and applies this approach to the official discourse on German policies towards Afghanistan. It analyzes the justification of Germany’s civil-military engagement in Afghanistan in parliamentary debates between 2001 and 2011. Three questions are tackled: (1) To what extent does the justification of Germany’s military operations correspond to the notion of a “Democratic War”? (2) How do the Federal Governments deal with the problems and contradictions that are inherent to the Democratic Peace turned into a program of active and violence-based democracy promotion? (3) To what extent do the empirical results to the former two questions correspond to the specif-ic features of German foreign and security policies that have been emphasized in the literature.

Democracy does not cause peace among nations. Rather, domestic conditions cause both democracy and peace. From 1961 to 2001, democratic nations engaged in numerous fatal conflicts with each other, including at least one war, yet not a single fatal militarized incident occurred between nations with contract-intensive economies-those where most people have the opportunity to participate in the market. In contract-intensive economies, individuals learn to respect the choices of others and value equal application of the law. They demand liberal democracy at home and perceive it in their interest to respect the rights of nations and international law abroad. The consequences involve more than just peace: the contract-intensive democracies are in natural alliance against any actor-state or nonstate-that seeks to challenge Westphalian law and order. Because China and Russia lack contractualist economies, the economic divide will define great power politics in the coming decade. To address the challenges posed by China and Russia, preserve the Westphalian order, and secure their citizens from terrorism, the contract-intensive powers should focus their efforts on supporting global economic opportunity, rather than on promoting democracy.

Recent studies show that the democratic peace correlation is not significant once the potentially-confounding variable that can cause both democracy and peace, contract-intensive economy, is considered; this pattern holds in analyses of wars, fatal militarized interstate conflicts (Mousseau 2009), and interstate crises (Mousseau, Orsun, Ungerer and Mousseau 2013). These studies rescind the primary evidence for democracy being a cause of the democratic peace, and indicate that contract-intensive economy is the more likely explanation for it. This article addresses all recent defenses of the democratic peace correlation, reports results using a new measure of contract flows, and extends the investigation to all militarized interstate conflicts. Analyses of most nations from 1961 to 2001 show that there is no correlation of democracy with peace, and contract-intensive economy is the most powerful variable in international conflict. The era of the democratic peace appears to be at an end; subsumed by an economic peace.

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about ‘humanitarian interventions’ in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, ‘Rwanda 1994’ has been used (or, for that matter, misused) in order to justify an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering; on the other, the genocide that could arguably have been prevented represents the exceptional
case where military intervention can indeed be justified—but precisely because it is not in need of a specifically liberal justification. What would have made a military-based prevention of genocide justifiable in this particular case is
precisely the aim to prevent something that is universally agreed to be unacceptable (genocide). The liberal twist in the justification narrative, in contrast, tends to emphasize the difference between the (liberal) ‘us’ and the non-liberal ‘them’, consequently claiming the legitimate right for the ‘us’ to
decide about the use of force exclusively, that is, without the ‘them’. The continuation of the narrative into answering the post-intervention question ‘what now?’ then leads consequently into the necessity of imposing one’s own
system of rule as a general norm without due attention to the specifics of the situation ‘on the ground’. The exceptional features of ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the empirical event) thus point in a critical way to all those cases where ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the signifier) has been used to make the case for an ever-expanding
agenda of liberal (‘just’) war.

This paper shows that elections are good for peace and that politicians ’ fear of losing office is the reason why disputes between democracies are extremely rare. To examine the impact of electoral accountability on military conflicts, we construct a new dataset of executive term limits for a sample of 177 countries over the 1816-2001 period, and combine this information with a large dataset of interstate militarized disputes. In line with previous studies, we find that democracies are much less likely to fight one another than autocracies or mixed pairs of states. However, this “democratic peace ” result does not hold for democracies in which the leaders face binding term limits, which are as conflict prone as autocracies. We also find that disputes involving democracies with term limits are more likely to occur during the executive’s last mandate. To explain these findings, we provide a simple theoretical model

Auf den Boom folgt die Krise. Ganz so dramatisch wie auf den internationalen Finanzmärkten ist die Situation im Feld der internationalen Demokratieförderung sicherlich nicht. Aber von Krise, jedenfalls Ernüchterung kann schon gesprochen werden. Ob die dritte Welle der Demokratisierung lediglich in eine Phase der Stagnation eingetreten ist, oder ob sich eine veritable Gegenwelle anbahnt, ist noch offen. Dass aber die internationale Politik der Demokratieförderung auf zunehmende akademische Kritik und wachsenden politischen Widerstand trifft, ist kaum von der Hand zu weisen.  Der kritische Blick auf die Demokratieförderpolitik ist dabei eng verbunden mit einer Kritik des Paradigmas des Demokratischen Friedens und seiner Theoretiker,  und dies nicht ohne Grund: Spätestens in der Rhetorik der US-Regierung unter George W. Bush war die enge Verbindung des Aufstiegs der Paradigmen des Demokratischen Friedens und der internationalen Demokratieförderung nicht mehr zu übersehen – ebenso wenig wie das militante Potenzial dieser liberalen Fusion.
Das Thema des vorliegenden Essays ist nun nicht die spezifische Verschmelzung von Demokratieförderung und Demokratischem Frieden in der „Bush-Doktrin“.  Ich möchte diese vielmehr in einen etwas breiteren Kontext stellen und den parallelen Aufstieg und die Fusion der beiden Paradigmen in groben Strichen nachzeichnen. In dem Beitrag wird zunächst der Aufstieg des Demokratieförder-Paradigmas verfolgt (2.), sodann derjenige des Theorems vom Demokratischen Frieden skizziert (3.).  Den Abschluss bilden fünf Thesen zur problematischen Fusion von Demokratischem Frieden und Demokratieförderung (4.).

The American Civil War is one of the favoured examples of scholars aiming to show the spuriousness of the claim that democracies do not fight each other. While proponents of democratic peace theory (DPT) point to the fact that the theory in its mainstream version does not cover intrastate wars and also question whether the slave-holding Confederate States of America can be classified as a democracy, this article takes a different approach. Using insights from the perceptional interpretation of DPT and interpreting discourses and speeches from the North as well as the South, I will show that a closer look at the case reveals it is very much in line with DPT and underlines rather than undermines the logic of the democratic peace.

The United Kingdom is one of those democracies that are particularly often involved in military conflicts. Britain went to war five times in the first six years of Tony Blair's premiership alone: 'No British Prime Minister and few world leaders come close' (Kampfner 2003: ix). John Kampfner goes on to say that British intervention ism in the post-Cold War era is no longer defined by traditional concepts of national interest. As I intend to illustrate in this chapter, it is rather the idea of standing up for certain values and being firm against aggressors, both notions stemming from a strong liberal tradition in Britain, as well as the desire to play an active role in shaping international relations — all integral parts of Britain's foreign policy role conception — that help to understand the country's military engagement in the world.

Abstract According to many of its proponents, the proposition that democracies do not fight each other is 'as close as anything we have to an empirical law'. However, there have been several incidents among solidified liberal democracies where force was threatened or ...

A few years ago, it was a common complaint that the international dimension of democratization and, in particular, the external promotion of democracy were largely neglected by scholars of comparative politics and international relations. By now, academic research has begun to catch up with the growth of foreign and development policies explicitly aiming at the international promotion and protection of democratic regimes. Yet, what is still a largely unexplored desideratum is the challenge to theoretically grasp “democracy promotion” as aim and strategy of democratic foreign policies, that is, to embed the empirical research on democracy promotion in theoretical perspectives on international relations. This article sets out to contribute to filling this gap by developing a classification of competing theoretical approaches. First, research on the Democratic Peace – the one major research program concerned with democratic foreign policy – is used to derive potential motives behind the promotion of democracy. On this basis, second, existing international relations theories are modified in order to locate democracy promotion within the foreign policy of democratic states. In conclusion, the article presents four sketches of potential theoretical approaches to the external promotion of democracy.