peace and democracy essay

Democracy and Global Peace Essay

Introduction, democracy and peace, works cited.

Democracy and global peace are intimately related. Democracy contributes to global peace. Nations can barely achieve peace in absence of democracy. For years, democratic governments have partnered to promote peace worldwide (Rosato 507).

The governments believe that free people can coexist harmoniously and work together for common goals. According to Rosato, Democratic Peace Theory maintains that democratic states hardly fight with one another (509). Consequently, the spread of democracy will help to accomplish global peace that many countries desire.

In most cases, people overlook the benefits of democracy. Some scholars argue that democracy is a major threat to universal peace (Spiro 44). They argue that the United States, which is a renowned democracy, is always at war with other countries, particularly from the Middle East.

Opponents of democracy argue that it forces governments to intervene in other states’ affairs in the name of restoring peace. The fact that major democracies are nonviolent is an indication that the potential spread of democracy will lead to a secure world.

Hermann and Kegley argue that democracy does not lack its flaws (11). Hence, it is imperative not exaggerate or feign the advantages of democratization. Nonetheless, democracy has innumerable benefits to societies and world at large. Studies have shown that democratic states have never gone to war with each other.

In addition, statistics has confirmed that liberal states enjoy shared democratic peace. Challengers of democracy argue that liberal nations coexist peacefully with each other, but are apt to go to war with non-democratic countries (Hermann and Kegley 12). They cite the peaceful coexistence between the United States and Britain.

The countries uphold shared economic benefits that make them to coexist peacefully. The potential spread of democracy will lead to many countries engaging in trade, thus strengthening their ties and shunning disputes (Ray 28).

For instance, economic interdependence between Brazil and Argentina promotes democracy amid the two nations. On the other hand, lack of economic interdependence between Armenia and Azerbaijan made it hard to democratize the two nations and prevent them from fighting.

The spread of democracy will help to establish shared norms among countries, therefore ensure that they respect each others’ sovereignty. Democracy promotes the principles of liberalism. Consequently, one reason why liberal states do not fight is because they dedicate to safeguard the principles of freedom (Spiro 47).

Democratic ideologies offer no validation for conflict among democratic states. As a result, states address their disputes amicably.

In democratic systems, leaders are held accountable for all their actions. Hence, they fear to take actions that can make them to crash with the public. Besides, leaders are supposed to consult numerous institutions before making decisions.

For instance, in the United States, the president has to consult both the legislature and the executive before making key decisions. Institutional constraints found within democratic nations prevent countries from going to war with others.

The spread of democracy will ensure that national leaders are held accountable for their actions, thus ensuring that they do not result in wars in case of conflicts. Democratic nations ensure that all processes are transparent. Hence, they eliminate cases of prejudice and misperceptions that lead to conflicts.

There exist social forces that pull people in diverse directions in democratic societies. Hence, individuals are concerned with personal affairs making it difficult for them to fight since they do not share common interests. In most cases, violence emerges when people or nations compete for shared interests or economic resources.

In other words, the spread of democracy discourages the growth of common interests that lead to political and social conflicts. In totalitarian governments, social interests are centrally determined and controlled (Lai and Slater 114). Hence, chances of polarization of primary interests are high leading to conflicts.

For instance, the past turmoil experienced in Sierra Leone was as a result of polarized primary interests. In democratic states, people are tolerant to losses. However, totalitarian regimes are intolerant of losses. Consequently, they turn to violence as a way to protect their interests.

Democracy discourages union of public interests, which contribute to foreign hostility (Lai and Slater 115). Moreover, democratic leaders are unable to pursue foreign aggressions due to lack of public support.

Hence, the spread of democracy will help to tame global leaders and discourage them from engaging in international conflicts aimed at serving their egos and personal interests. Democracy requires states to deliberate on laws that outline when a country is supposed to engage in international conflicts.

Hence, it gives states an opportunity to weigh the effects of engaging in international conflicts and look for alternative measures.

The potential spread of democracy will provide numerous benefits to current and new democracies. However, scholars are against the proposition that democracies do not go to war. Democracy accommodates change of policies if states happen to conflict.

Moreover, it promotes liberal values and gives all people the freedom to participate in state’s affairs, thus avoiding hatred and animosity among citizens. The spread of democracy will guarantee that states no longer depend on military and economic power for peace.

Moreover, spread of democracy will ensure that there is peaceful coexistence among developed and developing states. Therefore, developed nations will no longer be afraid of emerging economies.

Hermann, Margaret and Charles Kegley. “Military Intervention and the Democratic Peace.” International Interactions 21.1 (1995): 1–21. Print.

Lai, Brian and Dan Slater. “Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992”. American Journal of Political Science 50.1 (2006): 113-119. Print.

Ray, James Lee. “Does Democracy Cause Peace?” Annual Review of Political Science 1.1 (2007): 27–46. Print.

Rosato, Sebastian. “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory.” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 585–602. Print.

Spiro, David. “Give Democratic Peace a Chance? The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace.” International Security 19.2 (2004): 41-53. Print.

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Article contents

Is democracy a cause of peace.

• Dan Reiter Dan Reiter Department of Political Science, Emory University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.287
• Published online: 25 January 2017

Essentially all scholars agree that the levels of violent conflict, especially wars, within democratic pairs of states are significantly lower than levels of violent conflict within other pairs of states. However, debate rages as to whether this observed correlation is causal or spurious. Does democracy actually cause peace? Answering this question is critical for both scholarly and policy debates.

Critics have lodged two sets of arguments proposing that the observed correlation between democracy and peace does not mean that democracy causes peace. First, some claim that the peace observed among democracies is not caused by regime type, but rather by other factors such as national interest, economic factors, and gender norms. These critics often present statistical analyses in which inclusion of these or other factors render the democracy independent variable to be statistically insignificant, leading them to draw the conclusion that democracy does not cause peace.

The second critique claims that there is a causal relationship between democracy and peace, but peace causes democracy and not the reverse. Peaceful international environments permit democracy to emerge, and conflictual international environments impede democracy. Though peace causes democracy, democracy does not cause peace.

Careful examination of the theoretical claims of these critiques and especially the pertinent empirical scholarship produces two general conclusions. First, there is enough evidence to conclude that democracy does cause peace at least between democracies, that the observed correlation between democracy and peace is not spurious. Second, this conclusion notwithstanding, the critiques do make important contributions, in the sense that they demonstrate that several factors (including democracy) cause peace, that there may be some qualifications or limitations to the scope of the democratic peace, and that causality among factors like democracy and peace is likely bidirectional, part of a larger dynamic system.

• democratic peace
• domestic politics
• international relations
• empirical international relations theory

The Democratic Peace Debate

One of the most indisputable, nontrivial, observed patterns in international relations is that democracies almost never fight each other. Few dispute the existence of the empirical association of democracies not fighting each other, especially not fighting high-intensity conflicts such as wars. There is, however, great contention, over whether or not democracy causes peace. Some argue that democracy does in fact cause peace, while others argue that the observed democracy-peace correlation is either spurious or that causal arrow is reversed, as peace causes democracy but democracy does not cause peace.

Whether or not democracy causes peace is an issue of more than scholarly interest. For decades, international actors have sometimes supported democratization because of the belief that making states more democratic would cause them to be more peaceful, at least with each other. Conversely, policy critics have argued that because democracy does not cause peace, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to spread democracy, because of the costs and risks of trying to democratize other states.

This essay considers whether democracy causes peace. It proceeds in three sections. First, it describes the empirical pattern that democracies almost never fight each other, and presents the principal theoretical arguments as to why democracy might cause peace. It then considers two clusters of critiques of the proposition that democracy causes peace, that the correlation is spurious and that peace is actually caused by factors other than democracy; and that democracy and peace are causally related, but that peace causes democracy, and not the reverse.

The Correlation of Democracy and Peace

Though democracies sometimes become embroiled in conflicts with non-democracies, they almost never fight each other (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ). Since the emergence of modern democracy in the early 19th century, two mature democracies have never experienced intense violent conflict with each other, incurring at least 1,000 battle dead. The Correlates of War project and other data sets have long classified a conflict as a war if it experiences at least 1,000 battle dead (Reiter et al., 2016 ). On the rare occasions when two democracies have entered militarized disputes with each other, as in the 1898 Fashoda Crisis or the 1970s “Cod Wars” between Britain and Iceland, they essentially always settle the conflict short of war.

There have been close calls of democracies nearly fighting wars against each other. Mature democracies have sometimes fought repressive states with some democratic elements, such as the United States fighting Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War (Ray, 1995 ). Democracies sometimes end up as members of opposing coalitions, though in those cases the opposing democracies avoid fighting each other. Democratic Finland fought alongside the Axis in World War II, but experienced no combat with any democratic members of the Allies. In the 1948 War of Israeli Independence, a somewhat democratic Lebanon found itself allied with Arab states against the new Israeli democracy, but Lebanon carefully avoided direct clashes with Israel (Morris, 2008 , pp. 344, 348). In the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, though Israel launched strikes against Hezbollah forces based in Lebanese territory, Israel did not declare war on democratic Lebanon and generally avoided attacking Lebanese forces directly. Lebanon also mostly avoided attacking Israel forces. Probably the closest instance of two democracies going to war with each other was the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan, though that conflict experienced less than 1,000 battle dead (Reiter et al., 2016 ). More systematic studies have also found that pairs of democratic states are less likely to experience less intense violent, international conflicts than other pairs of states (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ; Rousseau et al., 1996 ), though there is debate over whether jointly democratic pairs of states are less likely to experience non-war disputes as compared with all other pairs of states, or just with pairs of states that include a democracy and a non-democracy (Bennett & Stam, 2004 ).

Though there is strong consensus about the “dyadic” democratic peace, that democracies do not fight each other, there is more debate about the existence of other possible patterns of democratic peace. Many dispute the existence of the “monadic” democratic peace, that democracies are more likely to be peaceful in their relations with all states (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ; for an early statement of the monadic democratic peace, see Rummel, 1979 ). There is also debate over the existence of a “systemic” democratic peace, whether making the international system or even a region more democratic will make the system or region more peaceful (Gleditsch, 2002 ; Mitchell et al., 1999 ).

Scholars have outlined two clusters of explanations as to why democracies ought to be more peaceful in their relationships with each other (Russett, 1993 ; for other summaries of the democratic peace literature, see Ray, 1995 ; Reiter, 2012b ). First, democratic political institutions nurture peace between democracies. There are a few variants of the institutional explanation of the democratic peace. Perhaps the most general account, first described by Immanuel Kant in the 19th century, is that because democratic leaders are elected, they know that pursuing unpopular policies will increase their likelihood of being removed from office. Wars are unpopular because of their costs in blood and taxes, and as a result elected leaders attempt to avoid wars. Dictators, in contrast, are confident that they can use the tools of repression to stay in power even in the face of popular discontent, and are more likely to go to war, knowing that they can more easily stay in power. One variant of the institutionalist hypothesis is that democratic political institutions impose higher audience costs on elected leaders who back down in crisis, and the prospect of higher audience costs in turn helps democracies avoid wars with each other (Fearon, 1994 ). Another variant proposes that the ability of democracies to mobilize their economies more deeply during war time deters democracies from attacking each other (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003 ). A third variant is that the diffusion of power within democratic governments, such as the separation of powers, slows the abilities of democracies to make war (Reiter & Tillman, 2002 ; Russett, 1993 ).

A second explanation focuses on norms. Democratic political culture emphasizes nonviolent means of conflict resolution, using tactics such as law and the courts, elections, and free speech to resolve disputes. These norms percolate into democratic foreign policy, encouraging democracies to being more willing to use foreign policy tools such as mediation, diplomacy, and international law to resolve international disputes. The political culture of non-democracies emphasizes violence, as domestic politics within dictatorships are characterized by tactics such as repression, mass and elite revolutions, and brutality. This political culture of violent conflict resolution then pushes non-democracies to be violent in their international relations, using coercion, threats, and force to resolve interstate disputes. This normative explanation of the democratic peace overlaps with a constructivist explanation, that democracies share a common identity and see themselves as comprising a community of like-minded states. These shared identities, especially in concert with norms of nonviolent conflict resolution, help democracies transcend self-interest, enjoy deeper levels of cooperation, and avoid violent conflicts with each other (Deutsch, 1957 ; Kahl, 1998/1999 ; Risse-Kappen, 1995 ).

Causation and the Democratic Peace

The central claim of the democratic peace proposition is that democracy causes peace. As noted, the focus in this essay will be on causal processes within the dyadic democratic peace. The dyadic democratic peace proposes that relations within a pair of democracies are more peaceful than relations within other kinds of pairs, such as pairs of autocracies or a democracy matched with an autocracy.

Whether democracy causes peace can be framed around this question: Is the democratic peace a law, as Levy ( 1989 , p. 88) asserted, or is it a mere correlation? Risjord ( 2014 , p. 212), a philosopher of social science, distinguished “laws from mere correlations” as follows: “1. Laws must be general, making no reference to particular objects, times, or places. 2. Laws must support counterfactual statements.” Importantly, philosophers of social science agree that a law can be probabilistic and need not be exceptionless, analogous to the existence of probabilistic laws in the biological sciences (Risjord, 2014 , p. 213).

In using the democratic peace proposition as an example in his discussion of causation and scientific laws, Risjord ( 2014 , p. 213) accepts that the democratic peace is a law: “If laws are general regularities that support counterfactuals, then the democratic peace is a law. It is a strong correlation that makes no mention of particular objects, places, or times. And it seems to support counterfactuals. American foreign policy in the latter 20th century has often aimed to reduce war by spreading democracy. This policy is supported by the idea that if a country becomes a democracy, it is less likely to declare war; if North Korea were a democracy it would be less hostile to South Korea. In this sense, then, the democratic peace supports counterfactuals and is entitled to prima facie status as a law.” 1 Note that the idea of counterfactual separates causal from spurious relationships, as a spurious relationship would not support a counterfactual. The focus of this essay is to explore two critiques of the assertion that the democratic peace is causal, and therefore a law. That is, in the context of the Korea example, if the democratic peace is mere correlation and spurious rather than causal, then the democratization of North Korea would not lead to reduced hostility with South Korea.

Proving that democracy causes peace has both scholarly and policy stakes. On the scholarly side, democratic peace theory describes a causal rather than correlational relationship, meaning that tests of the theory need to demonstrate causation rather than mere correlation. The democratic peace proposition is itself a centuries-old idea central to international relations, at the heart of one of the most prominent and well-established theories in international relations, Kantian liberalism (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ). Other theories of international relations refute the assumptions of democratic peace theory in this manner. Realism, for example, proposes that regime type has no effect on peace or war, because the brutally competitive nature of the international system forces all states, democratic and non-democratic, to behave similarly (see below for further discussion).

The policy stakes are also high. The policy implications of the democratic peace are that because democracy causes peace, actors interested in peace should take actions to spread democracy. Many important foreign policy decisions over the last century have been informed by the belief that democracy causes peace. This was an important part of President Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 public argument as to why the United States should enter World War I, that Prussian autocracy was a fundamental cause of the war, and the United States needed to help the Allies win the war to democratize Germany and create the foundations for a stable peace: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.” 2 The idea that democracy causes peace was part of the motivation to pursue the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers in World War II; that autocracy in Japan, Italy, and Germany were taproot causes of World War II; and that the United States needed to achieve the unconditional surrender of these states to permit the United States to democratize them, democratization in turn being a critical condition for creating a stable postwar world order (Reiter, 2009 ). President Clinton openly stated his belief in the democratic peace, and this belief in turn informed a number of his policies, including the 1995 intervention in Haiti and the expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe (Reiter, 2001 ). Especially after 2003 , President George W. Bush justified the Iraq War with the democratic peace proposition, arguing that democratizing Iraq would in turn help stabilize the Middle East. In his 2005 inaugural address, President Bush stated unequivocally, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” 3 During the Obama administration, some hoped that the Arab Spring, if it succeeded in ushering in stable democratic regimes, might permit the stabilization of the Middle East (Strauss, 2012 ).

The policy implications of whether democracy causes peace persist. Policy-makers would like to know whether the 2010s deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations was caused by the collapse of democracy in Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin. Pakistan is enjoying an encouraging spell of democracy, and this might create an opening for the alleviation of the India-Pakistan rivalry. Perhaps Iran’s initial steps toward democracy, such as the election of a moderate president in 2013 , might eventually permit improved relations with democratic rivals such as Israel and the United States. Some have debated whether or not a Chinese transition to democracy in the 21st century would substantially reduce the probability of war with democracies such as Japan and the United States (Friedman & McCormick, 2015 ).

Though most scholars concede that a pair of democracies is less likely to experience violent conflict than other pairs of states, some critique the inference that this observed pattern implies a causal relationship. These critics have made two major sets of causal critiques of the inference that the observed correlation of democracy and peace provides support for the hypothesis that democracy causes peace. 4 The following sections describe and discuss these critiques.

Is the Democratic Peace Correlation Spurious?

The spuriousness critiques.

The first set of critiques is that the observed correlation between dyadic democracy and peace is spurious. More informally, the critique is that the observed peace between democracies is caused by factors other than democracy, and not by democracy itself. More rigorously, consonant with the definition of a law provided above, the observed peace between democracies would not support the counterfactual that taking a pair of democracies and rendering one of them non-democratic would make their relationship less peaceful. Whether the democratic peace is spurious or causal is not merely a semantic quibble. Scientists across the social and natural sciences maintain a deep interest in determining whether an observed correlation is causal or merely spurious. Identifying causation is critically important in translating scientific findings into policy recommendations, in areas such as dietary guidelines, poverty reduction, education, fighting disease, and others.

Scholarship making the claim that the democratic peace is spurious frequently takes the following form. On the theoretical side, an alternative explanation for the causes of peace is provided. On the empirical side, a critique will present a previously published multivariate regression analysis showing support for the dyadic democratic peace, and then show that adding to this regression analysis an additional independent variable that measures the new, alternative explanation will cause the dyadic democratic peace variable to become statistically insignificant. Adding the new variable is justified from a methodological point of view as a means of improving the model by reducing what is referred to as “omitted variable bias.” The critique then draws the inference that because the inclusion of this additional variable (or variables) renders the democracy variable statistically insignificant, the initial result was flawed because of omitted variable bias. In turn, the inference is that the initial observed correlation between democracy and peace is spurious rather than causal, and that as a causal hypothesis the democratic peace proposition is not supported. A further implication is that because the democracy-peace relationship is spurious rather than causal, policy-makers should avoid concluding that spreading democracy will in turn cause the world to be more peaceful. 5

Scholars have made a number of arguments about the spuriousness of the democratic peace, that is, they have pointed to a series of different variables that if included in multivariate regressions render the democracy-peace correlation statistically insignificant. The oldest and perhaps most central proposition of this type is the realist argument that common national interests rather than joint democracy explain peace. As indicated above, realism proposes that international relations are fundamentally driven by national interests, and not by domestic politics or institutions. Further, realism places no faith in the ability of public opinion coupled with democratic institutions to be a force for peace, because public opinion is not necessarily rational or peaceful; and because elected and other leaders can circumvent the constraints of public opinion through secrecy and other forms of manipulation (e.g., Mearsheimer, 2011 ; Rosato, 2003 ; Schuessler, 2015 ). Historically, the collapse of the international order in the interwar period made realist critics such as E. H. Carr, Walter Lippmann, and Hans Morgenthau deeply skeptical of Wilson’s vision that the spread of democracy could support global peace. Waltz ( 1959 ; 1993 , p. 78) from the 1950s through the 1990s was also critical of the Kantian hope that democracy would bolster peace, proposing that the brutally competitive nature of the anarchic international system forces different types of political regimes to adopt converging foreign policies in order to survive. Realists in turn proposed that any observed correlation between democracy and peace must be spurious, and in turn that the observed peace between democracies was caused by commonalities in interest and/or by a functioning balance of power rather than by regime type (see Layne, 1994 ; Mearsheimer, 2014 ; Rosato, 2003 ).

Several quantitative studies have endeavored to demonstrate that decisions for war and peace are caused by realist factors such as national interests and the balance of power, and not by regime type. In the 1990s, realist critics took note that the first wave of rigorous quantitative democratic peace studies focused on the 1950–1985 time period, suggesting that especially during this Cold War period democracies were unwilling to fight each other not because of institutions or norms, but because North American, East Asian, West European, and South Pacific democracies needed to balance together against a common Communist threat. A variant of this argument is that peace among democracies during the Cold War was maintained by American hegemony, that a democratic America managed conflict among states within the democratic, anti-Communist bloc to solidify its global power position.

These studies took different approaches to demonstrating this point. Gowa ( 1999 ) argued that the democratic peace was a temporal phenomenon; that pairs of democracies were indeed less likely to become involved in militarized interstate disputes or wars after 1945 ; were less likely than other pairs of states to become involved in MIDs but not wars from 1919–1938 ; and were as likely to become involved in wars and MIDs before World War I. That is, she measured the presence of common interest indirectly by comparing political eras, arguing that democracies shared common interests after 1945 , confronting the Communist threat, and therefore unsurprisingly were less likely to fight each other. Before World War II, she argued, when there were fewer common interests among democracies, the observed correlation between democracy and peace disappears.

Gartzke ( 1998 ) took a more direct approach toward testing the same theoretical supposition. He also proposed that common interest rather than joint democracy was the true cause of the observed peace between democracies, especially in the post- 1945 period. Rather than comparing eras as Gowa did, he analyzed the post- 1945 period, but included in his regression analysis a variable of common interest, measuring how similar were the United Nations General Assembly voting patterns of two states. He found that this variable was statistically significantly related to dyadic peace, and that inclusion of this variable rendered the joint democracy variable statistically insignificant as an explanation of dyadic peace. Some observers have also suggested that the observed peace between democracies is caused by geographic factors rather than regime type (Worley, 2012 ).

An additional cut on the national interests argument is that conflicts are caused by interstate disputes over contested issues, like territory, and not by regime type. Gibler ( 2012 ) focused on territorial disagreements between states. He proposed that territorial disagreements are the fundamental cause of conflict between states, and that inclusion of variables that measure the stability of borders, and therefore the absence of territorial disagreement, rendered the joint democracy independent variable to be statistically insignificant as a cause of peace.

A second cluster of spuriousness critiques focuses on economic rather than political factors. A perhaps more limited version of this critique is that there is a peace among democracies, but only in the developed world and not in developing areas such as sub-Saharan Africa (Henderson, 2008 ). A more ambitious form of this critique is that development and markets are the true causes of peace, and that democracy is uncorrelated with peace when these factors are accounted for. There are some variants of this observation. Gartzke ( 2007 ) focused on higher levels of economic development, proposing that more developed states enjoy lower marginal gain from winning a war over economic assets, and in turn are less likely to become embroiled in war. Conceptually, there is a related strand of research that war has become obsolete as states’ economies have become more advanced and rely more on trade and the global market (Rosecrance, 1986 ). This point is also related to the more popular assessments of a “McDonald’s Peace,” the observation that countries with McDonald’s restaurants have never fought, McDonald’s being a sign of development (Friedman, 2000 , ch. 21), or the “greens peace,” the observation that nations in which golf is sufficiently popular (again, a sign of development) never fight each other (Plotz, 2000 ). Mousseau ( forthcoming ; 2009 ) made a different argument, proposing that only some forms of economic development nurture peace. He proposed that market-based societies place a cultural emphasis on contracts and the law. In turn, this cultural emphasis on law percolates into foreign policy preferences, pushing such states to prefer nonviolent means of conflict resolution. Mousseau proposed that inclusion of a variable measuring this emphasis on contracts and law, what he termed to be “contractualism,” renders the joint democracy variable statistically insignificant.

A third critique focuses on gender. One of the central questions asked in the study of gender and politics is the relationship between gender and war, with many arguing that biological sex and/or cultural constructions of gender are critical factors affecting the onset of political violence. Further, some scholars have used gendered perspectives to critique the proposition that democracy causes peace. Allison ( 2001 ) used Kant’s framework of perpetual peace to propose that the key cause of international peace is a feminine perspective on interpersonal care rather than joint democracy. Wisotzki ( 2015 ) suggested that gender equality encourages both democracy and peace, though she stopped short of proposing that there was no causal relationship between democracy and peace. Hudson and colleagues ( 2012 ) used new data on the physical security of women and political violence, finding that lower physical security of women makes political violence more likely, and that the inclusion of gender equality in the analysis renders democracy an insignificant determinant of peace. Notably, Hudson and colleagues’ unit of analysis is the state rather than a pair of states, and their measure of violence incorporates many types of violence, including intrastate violence. One of Hudson’s coauthors in earlier studies of the causes of interstate violence found in multivariate analyses mixed evidence that both measures of gender inequality and democracy were statistically significant causes of peace (Caprioli, 2000 ; Caprioli & Boyer, 2001 ).

Another possible critique, not quite leveled explicitly by any critics, is that common culture and common identity, rather than democracy, cause peace. This is perhaps an implication of Huntington’s ( 1996 ) “Clash of Civilizations” thesis: that differences in civilization or culture rather than regime type determine conflict between states.

To the great benefit of the broader field, these democratic peace critiques have enjoyed intensive scholarly debate, with both supporters and critics of the democratic peace successfully pushing each other to refine and improve their theoretical arguments and research designs. Regarding the critique that the democratic peace was purely a Cold War phenomenon, Russett and Oneal ( 2001 ), Maoz ( 1998 ), and Thompson and Tucker ( 1997 ) demonstrated that democracies were less likely to fight each other in the interwar and pre-World War I periods as well as in the post- 1945 period. Russett ( 1993 ) also presented evidence of a democratic peace in ancient Greece and in pre-modern societies, and Park ( 2013 ) demonstrated that the democratic peace existed in the post-Cold War period, as well. Cederman ( 2001 ) took a different angle in addressing this question of the democratic peace being confined to the post- 1945 time period. He agreed that the peaceful tendencies of democracies had strengthened over time, but he proposed that such a dynamic reflects the kinds of macrohistorical learning process that Kant himself predicted would happen.

Supporters of the democratic peace have also published analyses showing that inclusion of UN voting records does not render the democracy variable statistically insignificant (Oneal & Russett, 1999 ), these claims in turn attracting response (Gartzke, 2000 ). The proposal that capitalism rather than democracy causes peace has also attracted critiques, mostly focusing on issues of research design to show that inclusion of capitalism variables does not render democracy variables insignificant (Choi, 2011 ; Dafoe, 2011 ). Regarding the possibility of common culture or civilization rather than democracy causing peace, observational data and survey experimental studies have found that the inclusion of culture or civilization as an independent variable does not moot the effects of joint democracy (Bolks & Stoll, 2003 ; Henderson, 1998 ; Johns & Davies, 2012 ; Lacina & Lee, 2013 ). Regarding whether inclusion of factors such as trade or geography render the democratic peace to be insignificant, Russett and Oneal ( 2001 ) openly claim that both joint democracy and bilateral trade cause peace, as part of the “Kantian triangle.” They demonstrate that inclusion of trade and geography variables does not render the democratic peace relationship insignificant. The observation that contractualism and not democracy causes peace has been critiqued (Dafoe et al., 2013 ), and that critique has in turn attracted response (Mousseau, forthcoming ).

The proposal that at least during the Cold War American hegemony rather than democracy itself fostered peace between democracies has also attracted scholarly debate. On a simple level, studies finding evidence of democratic peace routinely include dyadic alliance as an independent variable, including in the post- 1945 period (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ). A broader question is whether or not the United States at least during the Cold War used its power to maintain both democracy and peace within its sphere of influence. In general, the United States supported a variety of anti-Communist states, including democracies like Japan and France and non-democracies like South Vietnam and South Korea (Reiter, 2001 ).

The critique that conflict is caused by territorial dispute rather than regime type has also experienced rigorous debate (e.g., Gibler, 2014 ; Park & Colaresi, 2014 ). Huth and Allee ( 2002 ) found that democracy played an important role in affecting whether or not territorial rivalries escalated to violence. Other studies looked at the related issue of rivalry between states, territorial dispute being one type of rivalry. Hensel and colleagues ( 2000 ; see also Rasler & Thompson, 2005 ) found that democratic dyads are less likely to experience rivalries; and that among rivals, the presence of democracy makes the onset of violent conflict less likely.

The gender critique has also enjoyed some scholarly exchange. The most aggressive gender-based critique of the democratic peace (Hudson et al., 2012 ) uses a monadic design, and a dependent variable inclusive of a wide array of forms of violence including intrastate and interstate conflict. As noted, some other work that focuses on interstate conflict has included gender as an independent variable, and still shown that democracy has a pacifying effect. Using a dyadic research design, Regan and Paskeviciuti ( 2003 ) found that both gender and joint democracy affect the likelihood of interstate violence.

In short, the variety of critiques arguing that inclusion of additional variables in multivariate regressions of observational data renders democracy variables to be insignificant have each enjoyed rigorous debate. A larger question to consider is whether there are other ways of testing causation beyond this approach of testing the possibility of spuriousness by adding variables to a regression. There is ongoing debate within political science and the social sciences more generally as to the general utility of whether the addition of more independent variables always makes a regression model “better” by generating a net reduction in bias (Achen, 2005 ; Clarke, 2005 ; Pearl, 2011 ). There is a broader debate as to the general utility of multivariate regression of observational data as a means of assessing causation, given that this approach, sometimes called a quasi-experiment, requires the nonrandom assignment of the treatment condition (the independent variable).

This is not to take a maximalist position that quasi-experiments add nothing, or that adding variables is never advised. It does suggest, however, considering other means of assessing causation, in addition to the conventional approach of seeing if adding plausible exogenous variables renders the democracy-peace correlation to be statistically insignificant. Scholars have explored other means of assessing causation in the democratic peace, and have amassed three other types of evidence that support the conclusion that democracy causes peace: evidence demonstrating support for other empirical patterns suggested by democratic peace theory; evidence produced using experimental methods; and evidence produced using case studies.

The first type of evidence explores for the existence of other empirical patterns predicted by democratic peace theory. If a theory predicts the existence of a variety of empirical patterns and these patterns are demonstrated through tests, we can be more confident in the validity of the theory, and in turn that observed correlations are causal and not just spurious. And, indeed, there is a wide array of quantitative empirical studies that provide support for various assumptions or implications of democratic peace theory, especially for institutionalist accounts of the democratic peace. Perhaps the central institutionalist explanation of the democratic peace proposes that elected leaders are motivated to avoid fighting wars, because the costs of wars will incite popular discontent in turn threatening their hold on power. Studies have demonstrated a number of empirical patterns consistent with this view. Democracies fight shorter wars (Reiter & Stam, 2002 , ch. 7). Democracies suffer fewer casualties when they fight wars (Valentino et al., 2010 ), and when they fight, popular support for the leadership declines as casualties escalate (Mueller, 1973 ). The benefits of victorious wars may sometimes push democratic publics to accept the costs of war when they are confident of victory, and accordingly democracies almost never start wars they go on to lose (Reiter & Stam, 2002 ). During war, public support erodes as the perceived likelihood of victory declines (Gelpi et al., 2009 ). As the institutional explanation of the democratic peace would predict, variations of institutional and leadership form within democracies also affects conflict behavior, as in general more constrained states are less conflict prone (Reiter & Tillman, 2002 ). Consistent with the audience costs explanation, democracies can more effectively signal their resolve than at least some kinds of autocratic states (Schultz, 2001 ; Weeks, 2014 ). There are also some studies supporting elements of the normative explanation. For example, some studies have found that democracies are especially likely to use mediation or binding arbitration to resolve interstate disputes (Dixon, 1993 ; Raymond, 1994 , 1996 ). In total, though there are certainly scholarly debates about some of these observed patterns, 6 this collection of studies improves our confidence that democracy is causing peace in the manners described by democratic peace theory.

The second type of evidence uses experimental methods. Some have proposed that experimental methods enjoy critical advantages over the analysis of observational data in assessing causation. Experimental methods are able largely to skirt some of the biggest causal inference problems associated with quasi-experimental methods, such as biased samples and nonrandom assignments of treatment. That said, the limitation of experimental methods is that, especially in international relations, they can only be used to test some arguments, or some components of arguments. For example, regarding the democratic peace an experimenter cannot take a set of states and then randomly assign some to be democratic and others to be non-democratic.

That said, scholars have thus far been able to conduct survey and laboratory experiments that have tested some elements of the democratic peace. A number of surveys have found support for one of the core assertions of dyadic democratic peace theory: that citizens of democracies are significantly less likely to support the use of force against democracies as compared to using force against non-democracies (Geva et al., 1993 ; Johns & Davies 2012 ; Lacina & Lee, 2013 ; Mintz & Nehemia, 1993 ; Rousseau, 2005 , pp. 219–232; Tomz & Weeks, 2013 ) Other experiments have tested elements of the audience costs variant of the democratic peace, showing that the public does inflict audience costs on leaders who back down in a crisis (Horowitz & Levendusky, 2012 ; Tomz, 2007 ; Trager & Vavreck, 2011 ).

A third empirical means of demonstrating causation is to engage in process tracing through case studies. Scholars have presented several individual case studies of the democratic peace in events such as 19th-century American diplomatic crises, the 1898 Fashoda Crisis, the onset of World War II, the Spanish-American War, and many others (see Elman, 1997 ; Owen, 1997 ; Ray, 1995 ; Risse-Kappen, 1995 ; Rousseau, 2005 ; Schultz, 2001 ; for case studies presenting evidence against the democratic peace, see Layne, 1994 ). Some of these case studies demonstrate specific parts of the causal logic of the democratic peace, such as the ability of democracies to signal more effectively through invoking greater audience costs (Schultz, 2001 ), or the inability of elected leaders to manipulate public opinion or secretly drag their nations into wars the public would otherwise avoid (Reiter, 2012a ). Perhaps the most striking case study of democratic peace dynamics is the pacification of Western Europe after World War II, democracy helping to dissolve immediately and completely one of the most violent interstate conflicts in modern history, the France-Germany rivalry (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ).

Causal Arrows: Does Peace Lead to Democracy, but Not Vice Versa?

The causal arrow critique.

A different cluster of arguments critiquing the claim that democracy causes peace focuses on the direction of the causal arrow, proposing that peace causes democracy, but that democracy does not cause peace. The central claim of the “peace causes democracy” element of this claim is that threatening international environments motivate governments to improve their abilities to balance against these threats, and that part of that response is to expand the power of the state and to weaken democratic political institutions. Lasswell ( 1941 ) described how a sense of international threat can encourage the emergence of the “garrison state,” a government that empowers military leaders, emphasizes the collective over the individual, and prioritizes coercion over bargaining, as part of a process that eventually destroys democracy. Sometimes states will take internal actions to improve their ability to confront these threats, and these internal actions can in turn bolster autocracy and undermine democracy. One course of action is to strengthen the state itself, recalling Tilly’s ( 1975 , p. 42) claim that “war made the state, and the state made war.” Greater external threat may require a government in the short term to increase defense spending (Nordhaus et al., 2012 ) and revenue collection and total spending more broadly (Lektzian & Prins, 2008 ), expanding its control of the national economy.

A related point is that higher levels of external threat push states to reduce individual liberties, including political competition. Poe and Tate ( 1994 ; see also Davenport & Armstrong, 2004 ) demonstrated that participation in interstate wars was negatively correlated with a measure of the percentage of the adult population who vote and with respect for human rights. Conversely, autocracies may be more willing to undergo democratization in a peaceful international context as compared with a more threatening environment (Thompson, 1996 ).

Importantly, there are two variants of the peace causes democracy argument. The more moderate form proposes that the causal arrow runs both ways, that democracy causes peace and peace causes democracy (Crescenzi & Enterline 1999 ; Gleditsch, 2002 ; Midlarsky, 1995 ; Rasler & Thompson, 2005 ; Reuveny & Li, 2003 ; Thompson, 1996 ). Russett and Oneal ( 2001 ) framed this as part of a Kantian positive feedback loop in which peace, economic interdependence, democracy, and international organization all mutually and positively reinforce each other.

The more ambitious form of the argument contends that peace causes democracy but not the reverse. Authors making this claim present different types of quantitative tests to show support. James and colleagues ( 1999 ) is perhaps the most sophisticated, using a multiple equations model to demonstrate that peace causes democracy, but that the effect of democracy on peace is statistically significant but substantively negligible. Gibler ( 2012 ; Gibler & Tir, 2014 ) coupled his critique that border stability and not democracy causes peace with the observation that border stability in turn causes democracy. Mitchell and colleagues ( 1999 ) presented an interesting variant, albeit using a system level of analysis. Using Kalman filter analysis, they found that though democracy spreads peace, war itself can cause democracy, because democracies often win wars and victors in war pursue regime change.

As with the spuriousness critiques, the claim that peace causes democracy but that democracy does not cause peace has attracted scholarly debate. Regarding the garrison state thesis, some have proposed that levels of threat may cause states to grow stronger, but that need not come at the expense of undermining democracy (Friedberg, 2000 ; see also Zakaria, 1998 ). The James and colleagues ( 1999 ) article described above attracted scholarly exchanges (Oneal & Russett, 2000 ; James et al., 2000 ), though in a later article James himself (Enia & James, 2015 ) moved to the more moderate position of bidirectional causality, that peace and democracy both cause each other. Some scholars have been skeptical of the proposition that democracy causes peace, presenting quantitative evidence that peaceful international environments do not make democratic transitions more likely, or strengthen democratic regimes (Reiter, 2001 ). Pevehouse ( 2005 ) found only mixed evidence that regional conflict impeded democratization, and little evidence that regional conflict impeded democratic consolidation. Mousseau and Shi ( 1999 ) used interrupted time series models to make the point that peace did not cause democracy but democracy does cause peace. Kadera and colleagues ( 2003 ; see also Gleditsch, 2002 ) critiqued the view that the level of conflict in the system affects a democracy’s ability to survive, finding instead that democratic survival is more strongly affected by the number of other democracies in the system. Regarding the thesis that democracies spread democracy after winning wars, more recent analysis paints a different picture, finding that foreign imposed regime change often fails to implant either stability or democracy (Bueno de Mesquita & Downs, 2006 ; Peic & Reiter, 2011 ).

There are important methodological dimensions of the debate around the causal arrow critique, mostly concerning the difficulties of constructing a research design that would definitively conclude that peace caused democracy but democracy did not cause peace. One issue concerns the level of analysis. The dyadic democratic peace focuses on the pair of states as its unit of analysis, whereas the peace causing democracy thesis focuses generally on the single state, that a peaceful international environment will affect a single state’s likelihood of becoming democratic. The difference in level of analysis presents difficulties in constructing an integrated estimation strategy that could test satisfactorily both causal arrows (Reuveny & Li, 2003 , perhaps come closest to tackling this thorny problem).

Methodological issues aside, there is some theoretical inconsistency within the claim that peace causes democracy but not the reverse. The spuriousness critiques make theoretically straightforward claims: Peace is caused by factors other than regime type, such as national interests, and therefore democracy does not cause peace. In contrast, the causal arrow critique is less straightforward. It proposes that a threatening international environment undermines democracy because leaders perceive that democracy would impede a state’s ability to fight war, because a weak state would be insufficiently agile or powerful to mobilize quickly for war, and/or because individuals empowered by democratic political institutions might resist mobilization and/or a decision for war. 7 And yet if these assumptions are true, then they are in turn of course reasons why democracies are more peaceful in their international relations, the heart of the democratic peace thesis. That is, if states or leaders shun democracy because they fear democratic systems are better suited for peaceful rather than violent international environments, then the implication is that democracies ought to be more peaceful in their foreign policies. Peace would cause democracy because democracy causes peace.

Toward Synthesis

What conclusions should be drawn from the spuriousness and causal arrow critiques, both with regards to academic scholarship and policy? Should political scientists recognize that the theory that democracy causes peace has been empirically disproven, meaning that the theory should be rejected? When considering whether or not to spread democracy, should policy-makers no longer consider the benefit that democratization might spread peace?

There is enough evidence to draw the conclusion that joint democracy does cause peace, and that the dyadic democratic peace is a law. None of the spuriousness critiques, though intriguing, have sufficiently withstood scholarly rebuttals to justify dismissing as spurious the very strong correlation between joint democracy and peace, especially given the experimental, case study, and other quantitative observational work that provide support for different elements of the democratic peace argument. That said, the spuriousness critiques suggest possible modifications of the law of the democratic peace, such as perhaps that the democratic peace could be weaker in less-developed regions. Regarding the causal arrow thesis, though there is evidence that peace may cause democracy as well as democracy causing peace, the evidence is much weaker that peace causes democracy but not vice versa. Further, the claim that peace causes democracy but not the reverse contains theoretical inconsistencies.

That said, it is of course conceivable that future studies may emerge that cast decisive doubt on the proposition that democracy causes peace. Data collection in international relations is never going to be as decisive in supporting or refuting theory as data collection in fields like physics or chemistry, where highly precise, often non-probabilistic theory permits point predictions that can be tested many times in controlled laboratory settings. It also will not be as decisive as data collection in the medical sciences, where theories are probabilistic but experiments can be conducted on thousands of subjects and repeated dozens of times. That said, the evidence that dyadic democracy causes peace is as strong as the evidence supporting essentially any theoretical proposition in international relations, other than relatively trivial propositions such as that adjacent states are more likely to fight each other than nonadjacent states. Echoing his 1989 assessment, Levy ( 2013 , p. 587) remarked that in international relations “no one has identified a stronger empirical regularity” (Levy, 2013 , p. 587). That is, if the dyadic democratic peace is not a law, it’s as close to a law that we have in international relations, and probably as close to a law as we are ever going to see.

Even accepting that neither cluster of critiques dislodges the conclusion that democracy cause peace, the inescapable conclusion is that we live in a complex, multi-causal world. As the democratic peace advocates themselves have long recognized, many factors beyond democracy cause peace (Russett & Oneal, 2001 ). Democracy and peace likely mutually cause each other. Further, as Kant envisioned, this variety of factors each cause each other. Development may cause peace, but democracy also causes development (Przeworski et al., 2000 ). Gender equality and democratization are likely tightly connected in complex ways. Future empirical work using observational, experimental, and case study methods should continue to unpack and describe this web of complex and important relationships.

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• Waltz, K. N. (1993). The emerging structure of international politics. International Security , 18 (3), 44–79.
• Ward, M. D. , Siverson, R. M. , & Cao, X. (2007). Disputes, democracies, and dependencies: A reexamination of the Kantian peace. American Journal of Political Science , 51 (3), 583–601.
• Weeks, J. L. P. (2014). Dictators at war and peace . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Wisotzki, S. (2015). Gender, democracy, and peace: An ambivalent triangle? In H. Gärtner , J. W. Honig , & H. Akbulut (Eds.), Democracy, peace and security (pp. 121–134). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Worley, D. R. (2012, November 2). Democratic Peace? Huffington Post .
• Zakaria, F. (1998). From wealth to power: The unusual origins of America’s world role . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

1. Italics in original.

2. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson’s_War_Message_to_Congress .

3. https://www.inaugural.senate.gov/about/past-inaugural-ceremonies/55th-inaugural-ceremonies/ .

4. There are, to be a sure, a variety of other critiques of the democratic peace proposition. For a summary, see Reiter ( 2012b ).

5. Ward et al. ( 2007 ) used more advanced statistical methods to assess whether the observed democratic peace was spurious, peace being instead caused by other factors such as geography and other dependencies. Their approach suggested that democracy does still cause peace, but that the magnitude of the effect is lower than what had previously been suggested.

6. For example, on whether democracies win their wars, see Brown et al. ( 2011 ). On whether public support for war is driven by objective factors such as casualty rates, see Berinsky ( 2009 ). On whether elected leaders are more likely to lose power following defeat in war as compared with unelected leaders, see Chiozza and Goemans ( 2011 ).

7. Note that these specific claims are matters of dispute among scholars. The point here is that these are the specific points made by the causal arrow critique.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Democratic Peace Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Early Empirical Work
• Casualties and Public Support for War
• Audience Costs
• Variation among Democratic Political Institutions
• Variation among Authoritarian Political Institutions
• Democracy and War Outcomes
• Democracy, Alliance, and Wars
• Democracies, Conscription, and War
• Normative Accounts
• Systemic Outlooks and the Effect of Peace on Democracy
• Constructivist Accounts
• Democratization
• Methodological Debates
• Common Interests
• Critiques of the Normative Account
• Critiques of Democracy and War Outcomes
• Secrecy and Covert Action
• Qualitative Empirical Scholarship
• Formal Theory

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Democratic Peace Theory by Dan Reiter LAST REVIEWED: 25 October 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0014

Democratic peace is the proposition that democracies are more peaceful in their foreign relations. This idea dates back centuries, at least to Immanuel Kant and other 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers. In recent decades it has constituted a major research agenda, competing with and arguably supplanting other research agendas such as neo-realism. The democratic peace proposition has many possible empirical and theoretical forms. On the empirical side, some propose that democracies are more peaceful in their relations with all other states in the system (“monadic” democratic peace); some propose that democracies are more peaceful only in their relations with other democracies (“dyadic” democratic peace); others argue that the more democracies there are in a region or the international system, the more peaceful the region or international system will be (“systemic” democratic peace); and still others doubt the existence of any significant relationship between democracy and peace. Notably, most although not all empirical research on the democratic peace has employed quantitative methods of analysis. On the theoretical side, there are many different accounts of the relationship between democracy and peace, with most focusing on domestic political institutions, domestic political norms, and constructed identities. The democratic peace proposition is connected to many other propositions linking domestic politics and international relations, including that democracies are more likely to cooperate with each other, that democracies are more likely to win the wars they fight, that escalating military casualties degrade public support for war, that leaders initiate conflict to secure their domestic hold on power (the diversionary hypothesis), that democracies fight shorter wars, that different kinds of democracies experience different kinds of conflict behavior, that different kinds of authoritarian systems experience different kinds of conflict behavior, and others. The democratic peace also overlaps with related ideas such as the liberal peace and the commercial peace.

The democratic peace proposition has been lurking in Western thought for millennia, as Weart 1998 shows, but Kant 1991 provides its first modern formulation. The idea that global democracy would provide a solid foundation for global peace was restated in 1917 by Woodrow Wilson as a justification for American entry into World War I and then as part of his vision for a new world order. Modern political science first observed the dyadic democratic peace—that democracies tend not to fight each other—in the 1970s. The observation enjoyed greater attention in the 1980s in particular in two pathbreaking 1983 essays by Michael Doyle, reprinted in Doyle 2011 . It received fuller theoretical and empirical attention in the 1990s. Fukuyama 1992 , a famous argument that humanity had reached “the end of history,” incorporates the democratic peace proposition. Other scholars sought to develop the theory and push forward more advanced research designs in works such as Russett 1993 ; Ray 1995 ; and Rousseau, et al. 1996 . In the 2000s, proponents of the democratic peace responded to their critics and embedded the democratic peace in a broader Kantian peace ( Russett and Oneal 2001 ).

Doyle, Michael W. Liberal Peace: Selected Essays . New York: Routledge, 2011.

Contains a number of Doyle’s important essays, especially from the 1980s, that lay out the philosophical and theoretical basis of the democratic peace.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: Free Press, 1992.

Presents a Hegelian argument that humanity has at last achieved its penultimate form of political and economic organization, liberal democracy. The definitive intellectual statement that Western values triumphed in the Cold War.

Huth, Paul K., and Todd L. Allee. The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Application of the democratic peace to territorial conflict in the 20th century. Presents a massive new data set on territorial conflicts.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant’s Political Writings . 2d ed. Edited by Hans S. Reiss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Central essay is on the “perpetual peace,” which presents Kant’s vision as to how republics can maintain world peace. Originally published in 1796.

Ray, James Lee. Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Provides an extensive literature review on democratic peace literature up to the early 1990s as well as case studies of the Fashoda Crisis and Spanish-American War.

Rousseau, David L., Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth. “Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918–1988.” American Political Science Review 90.3 (1996): 512–533.

DOI: 10.2307/2082606

Important, early empirical test of the democratic peace, presenting important research design advances.Available online by subscription.

Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

The first book-length treatment of the democratic peace. Lays out the normative and institutional explanations of the democratic peace and presents a variety of different forms of rigorous evidence demonstrating the dyadic democratic peace, including sophisticated analysis of post-1945 conflict behavior.

Russett, Bruce, and John R. Oneal. Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations . New York: Norton, 2001.

Embedded the democratic peace in a larger theoretical framework, the Kantian Peace, in which democracy, trade, international organization, and peace all mutually reinforce each other. Presented more sophisticated empirical tests, addressing many 1990s theoretical and empirical critiques. Also see Democratization .

Weart, Spencer R. Never at War: Why Democracies Will Never Fight One Another . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Summarizes several years of work on democratic peace theory. Presents a narrative rather than statistical empirical tests. One main contribution is the analysis of democratic peace in pre-Napoleonic times, including ancient Greece and medieval Italy. Discusses the phenomena of democratic aggression and imperialism.

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Democracy and peace: an over-emphasized relationship

Author: Menandro S Abanes

Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 08/29/2008

Category: Essay

Today, more states are embracing democracy than three decades ago.[1] In 2006, there were 77 democratic states compared to 49 anocracies[2] and 34 autocracies (Hewitt et. al., 2008, p.13). What does it mean to the peace and security of the world? Is the world getting more peaceful as more democracies are emerging? Indeed, there is “a distinct downward trend” of the number of both internal and interstate active armed conflicts (Ibid, 2008, p.12). However, the downward trend is attributed not to the rise of democratic states, but to the end of Cold War period.

According to Thomas Hobbes[3] and Immanuel Kant (cited in Behler, 1986, p.276), the state of nature or natural state is a condition of war. Both philosophers treated peace as something to be established and endeavored by man/woman. Thus, how do we get out of this state of nature (condition of war)? Or how do we achieve peace?

To achieve peace, Kant proposed a league of nations, a federation of republican states under the law of nations which both secures and constrains freedom of states. In Kant’s idea, the expansion of this league would bring perpetual peace.

Is democracy a way out of this state of nature? Or does democratization (democracy has to start somewhere and sometime) reinforce this state of nature? The democratic peace proposition answers the first question positively. Ray (1998) believes that democracy causes peace. On the other hand, Mansfield and Snyder (2005) favor the second question. I shall attempt in this short essay to find out which of the two questions stands in scrutiny and analysis as more convincing and compelling to believe.

The ambivalence of the relationship between democracy and war could be highlighted in the global war on terror launched by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attack. The US-led alliance against terrorism has come to believe that preventive wars might be necessary to “build the ‘infrastructure of democracy’ abroad” (Mansfield and Snyder, 2005, p.1). This belief led to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq which at the time of the invasion were under despotic regimes. Wars were waged in the name of introducing democracy to these two countries. The premise of those wars was that democracy would bring freedom, security and peace to the two countries and to the world. After the invasion, democratic processes started to roll with elections leading the way. The expectations and hopes of these processes did not materialize as the conditions of Afghanistan and Iraq have been implicitly that of civil war which is a picture of Hobbesian and Kantian state of nature.

What is war?

The standard definition of war has come from the Correlates of War (CoW) project which helps further research on the topic.[4] It puts definitive measure to war as a conflict where at least 1,000 battle deaths are recorded in a given year (Mansfield and Snyder, 2005, p.91; Ray, 1998, p.31). This definition includes interstate, extra-systemic, and intrastate wars. For this essay, I make no distinction between interstate, extra-systemic, and intrastate wars. All of them deserve to be called “war”.

What is democracy?

As a system of government, democracy has four key elements; free elections to choose or replace a government, peoples’ participation in politics and civic life, human rights protection, and a rule of law that is equally applicable to all citizens.[5] A state that possesses these four key elements is said to be a democratic state.

To measure democracy, Mansfield and Snyder (2005) consider states to be democratic when there is competitive competition of political parties or groupings in the election, when the head of the government is popularly voted into office, and when “constraints on the executive are more than ‘substantial,’ based on Polity scale” (p.77).

Democracy and peace

There is a general consensus that no democracies have ever been at war against each other. The basic idea and reason is that “democracy is an important cause of peace” (Ray, 1998, p.27). Even Mansfield and Snyder (2005) agree with this when they argue that “a root cause of the democratic peace is that democratic institutions make government authorities accountable to the average voter” (p.51). So the leaders of democratic states would not risk their position or office by going to war because they could always be voted out of their offices by own citizens who would carry the brunt of war.

Democracy is not an absolute category, however, and there are many nations transitioning into (or out of) democratic institutions. Mansfield and Snyder (2005) argue that countries experiencing such transitions are actually “more likely than other states to become involved in war”, especially “countries undergoing incomplete democratization with weak institutions” (p.67).

Perhaps the most fundamental question that begs to be asked of the democratic-peace concept is: does democracy stop war from happening? Obviously it does not. Democratic states have initiated and engaged in plenty of wars. Just count the number of modern wars that the US and United Kingdom (UK), two known champions of democracy, have been involved in. I remember two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many others. Thus, democracy does not stop wars, and it does not offer us a way out of the Hobbesian state of nature.

Democracy and war

If democracy does not stop war, then does it go to war? I would say, yes! Even though democracies do not fight each other, “they fight and initiate wars about as often as non-democracies” (Mansfield and Snyder, 2005, p.49).

What about those democratizing states or incomplete democracies? Are they really prone to war? As mentioned earlier, Mansfield and Snyder (2005) argue that they are at a higher risk of going to war than either democratic or autocratic states. There are key features that make these democratizing states more likely to go to war. These are weak institutions and strong nationalistic sentiments. An example cited in the book, Electing to Fight, is the Falklands war between Argentina and Britain. The authors consider Argentina as “an incompletely democratizing initiator of the war” (p. 219).

In actual fact, however, Argentina was not democratizing at the time when the war was launched, although it was expecting an election. The war was more of an effort by the Argentina’s junta to hold on to power, than the result of any democratizing processes.

Carothers (2007) and McFaul (2007) are similarly critical of the assertion of Mansfield and Snyder. Carothers cites Francis Fukuyama’s comment that many wars in Europe for the last 500 years have had something to do more with state-building than democracy. McFaul, on the other hand, simply does not buy the arguments made by Mansfield and Snyder. He points convincingly to theoretical, methodological and empirical flaws of the thesis on democratization leading to war. One of the flaws McFaul cites is the mislabeling of those cases that are supposed to be “regime collapse or a return to autocracy” as democratizing states (p.164). He reviews the examples used in the book, such as France under Napoleon III and the Prussia case. McFaul hardly considers these cases as democratizing states, and I agree with him on this point. France was hardly a democratizing state when Napoleon III took power through a coup.

The evidences to support the argument that democratization causes states to be more war-prone have thus been undermined by Carothers and McFaul, and we are left with the conclusion that there is no direct relationship between democracy and war.

As an international peace student, there is a value though in the arguments of Mansfield and Snyder, in spite of the valid criticisms the book has received. There is always soe value in shedding light on the causes of war. For Mansfield and Snyder, it is democratization that has something to do with war. For realists, it is about geopolitics and self-interest. For pragmatists, it is greed. For freedom fighters, it is oppression and marginalization. For me, wars have peculiarities that make it difficult to categorize them grandly. Although I have special interest in understanding wars, I have come to abhor war which is the worst enemy of peace. However, war also makes peace possible and desirable.

Having reviewed the arguments for and against the concept of democratic-peace, I think the relationship between democracy and war is ultimately neutral and indeterminate. Democracy neither leads us out of our warlike and belligerent methods of dealing with conflict, nor does it particularly reinforce the condition of war.

Democracy by itself is not enough to begin or end a war; rather we must look to intermediary forces, such as economic and environmental pressures, untamed nationalism, the marginalization of minorities, and clampdowns on culture and religion.

Carothers, T. (2007). Misunderstanding Gradualism, Journal of Democracy , 18(3), 18-22.

Hewitt, J. et. al. (2008). Peace and Conflict 2008: Executive Summary . Maryland: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland.

Kant, I. (1986) [1795]. Perpetual Peace. In E. Behler (Ed.). Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writings . New York: Continuum, pp.270-311.

McFaul, M. (2007). Are New Democracies War-Prone? Book review of Mansfield and Snyder (2005), Journal of Democracy 18(2), 160-167.

Mansfield, E and J. Snyder. (2005). Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ray, J. (1998). Does Democracy Cause Peace? Annual Review of Political Science 1, 27-

Bio: Menandro Abanes is a master’s degree candidate from the University for Peace.

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Peace and Democracy: Views from the Global South

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Over the years, the literature on peacebuilding has predominantly focused on the study of post-armed conflict countries that have experienced international intervention. In these contexts, democracy or the process of statebuilding is something to be (re)built. The liberal peace agenda posits that democracy, security sector reform and solid economic institutions are key elements to build strong resilient states and societies, thus preventing the recurrence of armed conflict. However, this emphasis on post-armed conflict societies ignores peacebuilding analysis in other contexts that are also violent, but where strong (and often democratic) state institutions also exist. It also gives little attention to other contexts where, despite the absence of armed conflicts, localised violent conflicts and several peacebuilding efforts exist. This is the case of many countries in the Global South (for example Brazil, India, Mexico, Kenya and Nigeria). More importantly, while there are many comparative studies relating to post-armed conflict peacebuilding interventions, there has been no systematic effort to compare these cases with other types of violent contexts that warrant peacebuilding interventions. There is also little discussion regarding the role that democracy or democratic processes such as elections play in initiating, containing or preventing violence in these settings. Such an approach is important in helping us interrogate the relationship between democracy and peace/violence. This special issue seeks to fill this gap. The Collection aims to: 1) Problematize the relationship between democracy and peaceful societies; 2) Bring together the study of post-armed conflict countries and countries considered ‘peaceful’, and therefore perceived to be democratic (at least formally or nearly there) but which have high levels of violence; and 3) Bring together cases and scholars, especially early career scholars from the Global South to discuss peace, violence and democracy. We are interested in original research papers, reviews and policy reports that aim to: • Interrogate local ‘everyday’ understanding and views of peace, violence, and democracy and their relationship and how they relate to dominant mainstream views • Problematise the relationship between violence, peace and democracy in different case studies • Interrogate similarities and differences between post-armed conflict countries and countries that have high levels of violence but are considered ‘peaceful’ • Explore local, national and international peacebuilding activities in these different settings (reviews)

Keywords : Violence, Democracy, Peacebuilding, Statebuilding

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Martin Shaw

Democracy and peace in the global revolution

Draft for Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, eds., Making Global Spaces , Lynne Rienner Critical Security Studies series, Boulder 2000

How not to analyse democracy and peace

A historical framework : state relations in the national and international era

Democracy in the global revolution

Democracy in the new relations of war and peace

Bibliography

Since the 1980s, there has been, as James Rosenau (1990) proclaimed, a new ‘turbulence’ in world politics. Fundamental processes of change have affected both the internal politics and external relations of nation-states. Although these processes have been complex and contradictory, two major trends have been widely welcomed by liberal and democratic opinion: democratisation within states, and the pacification of relations between them. Even before but especially since 1989, the number of formally democratic - or at least democratising - states has increased rapidly on any criterion. At the same time, inter-state war - at least between central states in the international system - has become increasingly unlikely.

In this new situation, some political and international scholars have proclaimed a specific kind of deep connection between these two trends. Democratic states, it is argued, do not fight each other. Levy (1988: 88) has even claimed this tendency as the nearest thing to an ‘empirical law’ which political science has yet produced. In this contribution, I do not enter into a close critical discussion of this literature. This is not because I doubt either the credibility or the desirability of these trends, or indeed the plausibility of some kind of connection between them. It is because, however, numerous critics (see the survey in MacMillan, 1996), have already shown that the debate about the ‘democratic peace’, as it has come to be called, has posed these issues in very partial ways.

The democratic peace literature made an interesting move beyond realist international theory, in bringing the domestic politics of states back into the international equation. It represented, however, distinctly limited progress, since while linking these hitherto separated spheres it preserved their structural distinctiveness as the basis of analysis. In this sense it failed to address the very blurring of these analytical categories, which Rosenau (with his idea of ‘post-international’ relations) and many ‘global’ theorists had begun to suggest. In restricting the relations of democracy and peace to the correlation of domestic structures and foreign policy, democratic peace arguments bypassed much more profound attempts to restructure the categories of international relations, which were developing in the discipline. They largely ignored the question of how to grasp the relations of democracy and peace as aspects of the global changes of our times. This question that has been raised in various ways by many different contributions, all the way from the longstanding debate about interdependence in international relations, begun by Robert Keohane and James Nye (1977), to David Held’s (1992, 1995) conceptualisation of ‘cosmopolitan’ democracy.

The more interesting issue is therefore how to develop a more holistic conception of contemporary worldwide social and political change, in which the relations of democracy and peace can be understood. One direction from which this may be attempted is that of historical-sociological understanding, reflected in the serious attention paid in international relations to the work of social theorists such as Theda Skocpol (1979), Anthony Giddens (1985) and Michael Mann (1993). In this essay, I do not have space to discuss the general meaning (or problems) of this approach, which I have done elsewhere (Shaw, 1994, 1999c). Instead, I first suggest its desirability by first outlining the pitfalls of a historical and non -sociological modes of analysis. Second, I enter into a substantive discussion of what a historical and sociological approach to the question of democracy and peace might look like, offering a schema which raises some of the questions with which the new debate on the democratic peace might be concerned. Third, I examine the meaning of this historical and sociological approach to democracy and peace in the ‘global’ transformation of the present period.

It is an obvious but important starting-point to remember that democracy and peace are not timeless but historical social concepts. Indeed war itself - the negation of peace - is a historical product. Although some seek to explain war as a product of instinctive aggression, as organised violence it presupposes socially-controlled use, and originates in definite historical forms. Similarly, although there is reason to suppose that war and democracy might be opposites - war is clearly the negation of a democratic relationship between two parties - war has always been compatible, historically, with forms of democratic relationship within one of the organised parties to war (Shaw, 1997a). Indeed the ‘Western way of war’ is generally held to have originated in the same time and place as Western democracy: in classical Athens, citizens were also warriors.

The democracy with which we are concerned today is, of course, very different from that of Athens. It is taken for granted that democracy involves an open representative system based on elections through universal suffrage, with entrenched freedom of expression and association, within a nation-state. This is indeed the dominant model of the Western bloc of states, approximated in a number of other states worldwide, and rapidly becoming (since the end of the Cold War) the norm to which most states pay lip-service, as well as the object of American as well as general Western policy throughout the world (Robinson, 199?).

Even if, however, we agree some such definition of modern democracy, it tells us relatively little about the nature and changing role of democracy in the emerging twenty-first century world, including its relation to peace. Democracy has always been both an institutional form and a social movement - often even a revolutionary movement. In the contemporary world, while democracy is becoming normal, it is also contested - notably between those who wish to use democratic forms to maintain largely authoritarian elite rule, and those wish to enlarge popular freedoms and control. Democracy is part of the great changes of our times and as such is often partial and compromised as well as insecure and unstable.

Today’s wars are also very different, not only from those of classical Greece, but also from those of the recent historical past. We may define warfare as organised violence between two parties in which each seeks to compel the other to submit to its will. We may operationalise this (as most have done since the Correlates of War project: see Small and Singer, 1982) to count conflicts in which there are a thousand or more battle-deaths. But even with such a definitions it is by no means clear that we can find a normal model of contemporary warfare, since any such model, like that of democracy, is challenged by contemporary developments.

Warfare has undergone such huge transformations in modern times, and taken so many diverse forms, that even the standard modern form it is difficult to agree. The distinctive form is sometimes taken to be ‘Clausewitzian’ (van Crefeld, 1991; Kaldor, 1997), but I have argued that, given the conjunction of total mobilisation with total destruction in the warfare of the industrial era, it is better understood from a sociological perspective as ‘total war’ (Shaw, 1988). All agree, however, that the very idea of ‘modern’ war is under great pressure. New forms of war are emerging, seen either as ‘post-Clausewitzian’ (Kaldor, 1997 and 1998) or in terms of ‘degenerate’ forms of total war (Shaw, 1999b).

In these circumstances, it is even less clear that we know what we mean by peace. Many defined Cold War, despite its perpetual war-preparation and proxy wars, as a form of peace. While clearly non-warlike relations have been consolidated between the former Cold War adversaries, and war appears to be in the process of abolition between the major states or groups of states, the worldwide extent of warfare (let alone war-preparation broadly defined) is still alarming. Are we really to understand the post-Cold War order as peaceful - except when the growing lawlessness within the states of the Balkans, Caucasus or central Africa actually takes the form of fighting?

Finally, at the heart of these uncertainties about democracy, peace and war lies the conundrum of the modern state. We may agree some version of Weber’s general definition of states as organisations claiming monopolies of violence in given territories (Mann, 1993: 55, offers an improved, suitably qualified variation of this). We may even agree that modern states have increasingly taken the form of nation-states. This does not mean, however, that we can adequately define contemporary states as national institutions. On the contrary, the national character of states has been undergoing a critical transformation.

The classic modern embedding of national forms of state, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was within imperial relations. More recently, nation-states have been embedded in the bloc relations of the Cold War. Today’s unprecedented number of nation-states is implicated, however, in a new constellation: the emergent power relations of the global order. Many so-called nation-states are hardly able to guarantee the internal pacification which Giddens (1985), following Weber, saw as the hallmarks of the modern nation-state, let alone the external projection of violence which he saw as the corrollary. Today even the most powerful national centres - including the sole remaining ‘superpower’ - are actually embedded in pan-Western and emergent global structures of state power (Shaw, 1997b).

What these uncertainties tell us is that democracy, war and peace, and state or nation-state, are all concepts which need to be grasped historically, in the context of successive changes in social and political relations in general. If our own time is agreed to be one of considerable flux - indeed I shall argue more strongly that it is one of historic transition - then this is precisely the wrong time to try to fix the terms of debate about democracy and peace in terms of concepts of democratic nation-states and inter-state war inherited even from the recent past.

In particular, we should avoid three major traps of contemporary social science, all of which seem to be implicated in the democratic peace debate. Two of these are problems of the social sciences as a whole: the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Scholte, 1996), according to which national states and societies are regarded as the units of social analysis; and the corresponding idea that generalisations in social science should be established principally through the ‘comparative method’ which examines variations across national cases. Both of these ideas embed the idea that national units are the given structures of modern social order.

The corollary of these ideas is the third trap, the favourite notion of international relations theory: the idea that the world is primarily structured into distinct ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ spheres. By assuming the separation of these spheres, we can then proceed to ‘correlate’ the tendencies within them, as has been done in democratic peace analysis. But the notion that this is ‘frontier’ to be penetrated belongs to a particular historical epoch. This period, in which the world can be defined in national and international terms, is drawing to a close. Before we can develop a historical account of democracy and peace, we need to overcome these inherited flaws of modern social science in general and international relations in particular.

In this paper I can only summarise the general framework in which I propose we may understand the relations of democracy, war and peace. The core of my argument is that we can grasp these issues by locating them within the developing social relations of state power (which I call for short, state relations ) throughout modernity. My argument, which I am developing more fully elsewhere (Shaw, 1999), is that the history of the modern period has been the structured critically by the emergence, transformation and eventual decline of particular social relations and forms of state, which are most generally characterised as national-and-international.

My core assumption is that the pivotal historical changes within this modern era are not, as Marxists have proposed, changes in the mode of production as such, important as these have been, but changes in these state relations. In this era, in which typically state power has been fragmented between many major centres, it has been ‘janus-faced’ (Skocpol, 1979), pointing both ‘inwards’ towards society and ‘outwards’ towards other states. Following Skocpol, Giddens (1985) and Mann (1993), I take for granted that the capacity of particular states to mobilise power is developed simultaneously in relation to society and in relation to other centres of state power.

However the central issues in state relations have been two-way. State relations are not only about the control of state over society - its capacity for surveillance or mobilisation of social relations in general. They are also, in contrast, about the ability of society outside the state - individuals, groups and society ‘as a whole’ - to survey, limit and ultimately control the state. The question of democracy has been, in this way, one side of the political dynamics of the entire modern, or national-international, era.

I now need to introduce another key concept: state forms . In the modern period, states have tended increasingly to be centred socially on nations, so the forms of the state have been, in general, simultaneously national (relations between state and nation or groups within it) and international (relations between centres of state power). In this context, democracy has been defined primarily in relation to the nation-state (Held, 1995).

The fragmentation of state power within modern society has meant that the key to state relations has been war between major state centres, which has increasingly shaped the relations of state to society. Inherently linked to the state’s growing capacity for surveillance and mobilisation of society, war has been a central dynamic in the development of modern state relations. The democratic side of these relations has also been bound up in war: as a result of war-mobilisation, society often becomes aroused for political change, and in return for it, democratic states often offer or are forced to concede extensions of democratic rights.

This is particular true with total war, which we can identify (following Kaldor’s 1982 definition) as the dominant ‘mode of warfare’ in which war as a social activity has been organised in the twentieth century. In this mode, warfare has come to be the organising principle not just of state power but of economy and social relations in general. Thus I have suggested (Shaw, 1988) that the prime sources of change in twentieth-century society have been the contradictions of the way in which the expanded mode of warfare has impacted on society. And whereas Giddens (1985) tended to write out revolution from developed modernity, I argued that definite revolutionary processes could be identified within the ‘dialectics of war’ (Shaw, 1989).

If democracy has been a key question within all these political dynamics of the national-international era, and particularly within the dialectics of war, it has not conformed, to a single pattern, but has been constantly transformed and re-posed by each successive historical shift. In Table 1, I try to suggest (in a schematic way) the perameters of these changes, and the corresponding changing relations of democracy with war and peace, which are explored in this discussion.

A major problem for the hypothesis of pacific democracy lies in its articulation with dominant paradigms in international relations theory. If democratic governance explains at all the absence of war in interstate relations within what international relations generally characterises as a ‘Westphalian’ state-system, it can clearly be at best only a very partial explanation of war and its absence. That is to say, it can only explain the contrasting patterns of inter-state relations among democratic and non-democratic states. It cannot explain particular cases of relatively pacific or warlike relations within these groups.

In particular, the question of democracy can tell us very little about relations between states in the early period of the Westphalian system, since no state could be called democratic at that time. And yet Westphalia is generally supposed to have inaugurated a period of relative peace in interstate relations in Europe, compared to the period of general war on much of the continent which preceded it. Ironically, some of the earliest democratic movements (e.g.the radical movements in the English Civil War of the 1640s) had been implicated in that period of war.

The early post-Westphalia period, roughly up to the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, is best characterised as a ‘pre-national’ and ‘pre-democratic’ era. Although elements of modern nationality and democracy began to develop together in the core of the emerging world order of European empires in this period, states were generally monarchical and increasingly imperial. They also still had very limited mobilisation-capacity - either in political or economic terms - by later standards. Wars, mostly relating to colonies, were generally limited compared to those of the subsequent and even the preceding periods.

Democracy was very much a subordinate theme in these developments, although by the late eighteenth century it was part of a larger movement towards the growth of a distinctively modern, rational, secular, scientific world. In this movement, the possibility of new constitutional orders was linked to world peace in the most enlightened thought (e.g. Kant, 1796). However, the emergence of democracy as a revolutionary movement and a form of government was hardly a peaceful process. The classic modern revolutions, of 1776 and 1789, proclaimed universal liberal principles in order to create a modern basis for nation and empire. Because of their double threat (internal and interstate) to the old world order, they unleashed counter-revolutionary wars which spread across the European world order.

This was not a historical accident, but something intrinsic (as Skocpol, 1979, argued) to the character of revolution within an interstate system. Moreover, as Clausewitz’s observed (1831), a new form of war was quite clearly linked to developments within these early modern revolutions. In his trinitarian definition of war, therefore, the people represented its quintessentially violent character (generals were linked to statecraft, governments to policy). Since then, military thinkers like Howard (1983) have seen the democratic aspect of modern war - the people in arms - as a source of its prospensity to total violence.

Clearly the early revolutionary states were hardly stable constitutional democracies by contemporary criteria, so it might be supposed that democratic peace theorists could breathe a sigh of relief. They would be mistaken, however, to see this point as of limited significance. The forms of democracy have been harnessed to authoritarian, militarist and ultimately undemocratic purposes throughout subsequent history. Indeed, the tension between pacific and warlike tendencies remains pivotal to the modern history of democracy.

Only by severely restricting the nature of the linkage between democracy and peace as well as the relevance of cases can a one-sided account be sustained. French revolutionary nationalism turned, with Napoléon, into an imperial venture in which democratic tendencies were extinguished. Even relatively democratic settler colonists in North America, Australasia and Africa were distinguished by their often brutal - even genocidal - military campaigns against indigenous peoples (Mann, 1996).

In the high inter-imperial period at the end of the nineteenth century, the development of parliamentary democracy went hand-in-hand with that of imperialism and militarism. It is a questionable historical logic which legitimates the case of Western ‘democratic’ ‘defenders’ (Britain, France, the United States) against German ‘imperialist’ and ‘militarist’ ‘aggressors’ in the Great War. A more balanced judgement would surely recognise the real democratic elements alongside the imperialism in each state’s war-making, even while recognising the differences between them. German social democracy was notoriously mobilised to support the Kaiser, just as its British and French sister-parties supported their governments.

To make this case is not to ignore the important anti-militarist tendencies of democratic movements, particularly liberal- and socialist-internationalist. It is to argue that democracy often had double-edged significance for peace. The triumph of the Western allies in the Great War led to democratic revolutions in Russia, Germany and Italy as well as other states. But within these newly democratised nation-states, democracy was neither stable nor pacific. In Russia, the counter-revolutionary mobilisation by neighbouring states - similar to that after 1789, and whose backers included Western ‘democracies’ - led to a civil war in which the revolutionary democracy of the soviets was quickly extinguished. In Germany and Italy, the new, unstable post-war democratic conditions spawned the Fascist and National-Socialist movements, which glorified militarism.

Fascist movements are perhaps the archetype of the aggressive, anti-democratic militarism, the supreme negative confirmation of the democratic peace hypothesis. We should not forget, then, their exploitation of democratic forms and legitimacy in the seizure of power. Nor should we see the Western democracies as exponents of purely defensive war-making. Only by a historical sleight of hand could we dismiss (for example) the counter-revolutionary violence with which the ‘democratic’ European empires (France, Holland, even Britain) tried to retain their colonial possessions in and after 1945, as defensive.

The point of this polemic is that throughout the emergence, consolidation, heyday and decline of the European nation-state-empires, military violence and culture were structural conditions of democracy. There may be some truth in the idea that the most aggressive empires were least democratic, and that the most democratic were less aggressive. But no safe generalisations can separate democracy and militarism throughout this era. Only a profoundly limited theory and methodology would seek to simplify their complicated linkages in this way.

Moreover in the great crisis of the inter-imperial system, from the First to the Second World War, democracy took on a new significance in state relations. As the great imperial powers moved towards renewed and intensified total war, with much more total control over society, interstate conflict became much more highly ideologised. Nazi Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union were controlled by regimes with (counter-) revolutionary ideologies which denounced parliamentary democracy. Under these conditions, the democratic states mobilised their own populations by intensifying their democratic ideology. Through this process the meaning of democracy came to be understood, first in Britain and then throughout much of the West outside the United States, in terms of socio-economic as well as political rights. There was democratic reform - a social-democratic extension of democracy - as democratic claims became more central to the total-war confrontation and mobilisation.

The democracies were successful in the Second World War, not alone - since they were allied to the Soviet Union - and probably less because they were democratic (although that was a factor) than because, with the American economy behind them, they possessed by far the more powerful war-machine. The claim that this was a victory ‘for democracy’ was meaningful however, since the most extreme anti-democratic model, fascism, was fundamentally defeated and discredited. But even more apparent was that this was a victory for two states, the United States and Soviet Union, above all others and that the secondary victors, such as Britain and France, were subordinate through military and financial dependence if not, as in the case of Japan and Germany, through defeat.

The significance of the embedding of democracy in the Western military alliance became clear in the evolution of this situation into a clear-cut opposition between the two Cold War blocs. The bloc-order was a major evolution beyond the classic state relations of the old national-international world order, since it boiled down the rivalries of numerous major centres of state power to two superpowers and their dependent blocs. It was also a major evolution in that, within the Western bloc at least, alliance spawned integration among nation-states, and the bloc became an increasingly inderdependent single conglomerate of state power (Shaw, 1997b).

State relations underwent fundamental changes. In the Cold War, military mobilisation diminished rapidly and was no longer so extensive (or ‘total’) because of the nuclear transformation of warfare increasingly made the mass army redundant. Mobilisation, so far as it still occurred, was no longer simply national, because of the bloc-system. In these circumstances, while states became horizontally more integrated, they became vertically less integrated. States no longer needed to control economy and society in the same way as they had done in the era of total war.

With shrinking state sectors - even the powerful ‘military-industrial complex’ mobilised a smaller section of the economy and workforce over the decades - came the revival of liberal market economics. Within increasingly integrated Western bloc state-structures, with global reach - and in Europe, a particularly tight form of integration - new state relations developed which provided the framework for the increasingly worldwide, ‘globalised’ economy of the late twentieth century.

The relations of war and democracy in the Cold War flowed from these realities of bloc-competition. Democracy became a line of division and an ideology of the Cold War. The Soviet Union extinguished the transitional democracies of eastern Europe in order the better to control its satellites - as so-called ‘people’s democracies’. The United States developed the Western alliances as a bloc of parliamentary democratic states, notably imposing new democratic constitutions in western Germany and Japan, although some non-democratic states (Turkey, Portugal and Greece) were welcomed as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) so long as their regimes were anti-Communist.

Not surprisingly, democracies in this era did not fight each other. But this was hardly because they were democracies. Rather, they did not fight and were democracies for a common set of reasons: their mutual subordination to the major victor of the war (America) and their common rivalry with the Soviet bloc. As the Cold War period lasted for over forty years, Western-bloc integration developed apace, encompassing many sorts of economic and political as well as military institutionalisation, so that war between the component nation-states became less and less likely. Again, while democracy was a factor in institutionalising this integration, it was hardly the principal independent reason for it.

An ambiguous relationship between democracy, peace and war runs through the Cold War West. Democracy was undoubtedly a mobilising principle in the rivalry with the Soviet bloc. But as such, it was hardly an unambiguously peaceful ideology, since it threatened to lead to nuclear war, including the threat of aggressive ‘first use’. Nor, as Cold War ideology, was it consistently practised even in the Western heartlands. On the contrary, the Cold War was a justification for secret, even authoritarian state institutions and practices, from the McCarthyism of the early years through the continuing machinations of Western security services and the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons developments.

Even within the Western bloc, as we have noted, openly authoritarian states remained welcome, if generally marginal members. Outside the bloc, in the so-called Third World, Western states and especially the American superpower frequently - indeed generally - backed authoritarian, corrupt and military rulers, including apartheid South Africa, against democratic movements. This cannot, moreover, be represented as a peaceful process. Not only did the internal repression practised by Western-backed states frequently cross the line into civil war. The United States in particular also intervened directly or indirectly by military means to install, support or restore authoritarian rule. European democracies used military power to oppose colonial liberation movements. Western client states - such as Israel - launched numerous wars.

During the Cold War period, therefore, democratic states were hardly unambiguously peaceful in orientation. Moreover, the military conflict with the Soviet Union constrained the quality of democratic culture and institutions within the West, just as it restricted support for democratic movements in the Third World - and even within the Soviet bloc, since the West could hardly give effective support to democratic resistance if that would threaten inter-bloc war.

The Cold War period was a pre-global, transitional period in world order in which there was a major change in state relations. The replacement of the inter-imperial world order, in which a number of major independent centres of state power functioned increasingly more or less as ‘bordered power containers’, by a bloc-order, was a very fundamental change. The democratic structures and ideology of the dominant Western bloc-state undoubtedly conditioned the post-Cold War evolution of state relations in more global and democratic directions. However, during the Cold War, democratic movements within both the Soviet bloc and the Third World - and even social movements for democratic change within the West - often came up against the limits of the democratic Western state.

The end of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of several narratives of transition. Most pervasive in the late 1980s was the idea of postmodernity, according to which all historically given forms were in unprecedented flux and relativity. At the end of the decade, and the beginning of the 1990s, this was succeeded (although obviously postmodernist ideas continued to hold much sway) by the idea of a post-Cold War world. By the mid-1990s, this had given way in turn to the idea of globalisation as the dominant narrative. The changing influence of these narratives reflected moments in historical development: the widely diffused cultural sense of oncoming transformation in the 1980s, the dominance of political-military change in and immediately after the tumultuous events of 1989-91, and the pre-eminence of economic and communications changes most recently, as the political dust began to settle.

What is notable about these narratives is that they have tended to emphasise different processes of change (cultural, political-military, economic-communications), and that while the first two are defined in essentially negative terms (‘post-’), only globalisation proposes a new content (the global). On examination, moreover, this content dissolves into largely technical changes (time and space relations), with once again a dominant negative motif (undermining of the nation-state).

It is argued here, in contrast, that the global is not to be understood in this way, and that the current transition should be understood as a fundamental change which encompasses all the processes identified - cultural, political-military and economic-communications. Global means something different from simply world or worldwide, let alone international: globality (this term for the global is defined by Albrow, 1996) is about a fundamental unification or commonality of human social relations. The global transition is a revolutionary change, not just in the loose sense of ‘major’ transition, but in a specific sense of a fundamental change in state relations.

Clearly, the meaning of global change which I am proposing here is very different from that commonly indicated by ‘globalisation’. It differs in three major ways. First, it represents a change in which conscious, purposeful human action plays an important role, rather than the relatively mechanical process indicated by the term globalisation. Second, it is defined very much by political relations, which determine the context of economic and cultural change. Third, it is a set of radical and relatively sharp changes, rather than simply a gradual process. Furthermore, the global revolution differs from previous revolutionary transformations. It is not merely a more or less simultaneous international movement across a number of different nation-states. Rather, it involves a transformation of world order from the national-international order of the last two centuries to an specifically global order.

The global revolution is essentially a development from two major processes of the Cold War era, which I defined above as the final stage of national-international order and which contained many pre-global aspects. First, it is a further transformation of state relations and forms of the Western bloc-state, in the development of distinctively global relations and forms of state power. Second, it is a continuation of the democratic revolution, overcoming many of the constraints which were imposed on it from the Cold War period. These two trends come together to the extent that global state forms are defined in democratic terms, while democratic change increasingly shows a global dimension.

Recognition of the depth of the global revolution is limited because, in this unprecedented worldwide political transformation just as in any revolutionary change, there are many continuities (notably the national and international forms of state power). There are also many conflicts: the change is like every previous revolutionary transformation an uneven, contradictory and contested set of processes, meeting new obstacles which arise from remnants of the old relations and forms. It is also, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, very much an unfinished revolution.

The transformation of state relations and forms in general centres on the processes whereby the Western state-bloc, harnessing the globally legitimate institutions of the United Nations system as well as the wide range of more specifically Western international institutions, has established itself as the effective centre of worldwide state power. Secondary centres of power, notably the successors of the former rival Soviet bloc and the growingly powerful Chinese state, are increasingly but still problematically integrated into a larger, Western-centred conglomerate of state power. Tertiary centres, the major states of all continents and ‘regions’, are also increasingly, but very unevenly integrated. Some states remain largely on the margins: the extreme cases such as Iraq, Libya, Iran, North Korea and Serbia which have come into conflict with the West are defined as ‘rogue’ states, although even in these cases, there is some acceptance of international authority - at least in principle.

This transformation has generated a new name for globally legitimate authority, the ‘international community’, which is applied to the various manifestations of global and Western state power. These, of course, are shifting and variable - ‘polymorphous crystallisations’ of the global state rather in the way that Mann (1993) saw national power as fluid in form. There are two apparently contradictory sides to this legitimation of global state power. On the one hand, there is the assertion of Western and especially American power; the confirmation of the NATO as the dominant international military structure; and the preference of Western leaders for ad hoc alliances such as ‘contact groups’ rather than strong, enhanced permanent international institutions with clear legitimacy. On the other hand, there is the de facto as well as de jure embedding of Western and even American policy - despite the backwoodsmen in Congress - in wider international coalitions, the clear necessity of the United Nations as a legitimate institutional framework for Western power, and the real development of that framework.

Alongside this development of the global state is the unprecedented worldwide democratic revolution. The paradox of this revolution is that, of course, in form it is only partly global, and very largely national and international. As the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself unravelled from the late 1980s, and especially in the decisive period from the East German, Czechoslovak and Romanian revolutions of late 1989 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many states and republics were reconstituted on a democratic and national basis.

While the disintegrative tendency was clear, so was the integrative tendency. The new states which emerged from the Soviet collapse were mostly not - although some were and others tried to be - nation-states in the sense of effective, autonomous centres of military power. The more advanced and geographically Western of them, especially in east-central Europe, sought immediate membership of the European Union and NATO. Most, including even Russia itself, embraced key elements of Western ideology, worldwide political economy, international institutions and leadership.

Above all, almost without exception they embraced democracy. The democratic transition varied hugely from those states in which there were democratic revolutionary movements, to the many in which the old nomenklatura embraced democratic forms in order to restructure their power. However real or unreal the substance, democratic change was both for people and rulers alike - but often for very different reasons - a means of admission to and recognition by the new Western-dominated global world order.

The post-Cold War democratic revolution has not been confined to the former Soviet bloc. An early signal of it was the 1980s transformation of the majority of Latin American states from authoritarian and military to parliamentary-democratic rule. In the 1990s it has embraced large numbers of states in Africa and Asia. It includes such notable national changes as the ending of apartheid and the establishment of multi-racial democracy in South Africa. The Middle East is the major world-region least touched by this movement, although interestingly the Palestinian authority has been a forerunner of change towards elected authority, and post-revolutionary Iran also has genuine electoral processes.

In all regions democratic change has been linked to an increased if often critical orientation, by popular movements as well as governments, to international institutions and the Western-defined global order. Some major states, above all China, have to date resisted formal democratisation. Nearly all states are involved to a greater or lesser extent, however, in closely-linked global tendencies: no states have been immune to the social changes behind democratisation. It is not easy to envisage, therefore, the long-term exclusion of many states from at least limited or token involvement in democratic reform. There is very considerable momentum behind continuing democratic change, which state elites will find it increasingly hard to resist.

Democratisation is linked to global change particularly because of the new policies of the Western bloc and especially the United States. In the 1980s, after decades of supporting undemocratic regimes and promoting wars in the struggle with their Soviet rivals, Western leaders finally proclaimed democracy and peace to be appropriate worldwide. (Even in the early 1980s, under Reagan and Thatcher, the West was still willing to support or condone authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes and forces so long as they were anti-Soviet - although European governments were not always prepared to go along with these policies.) The conversion of the United States to ‘promoting polyarchy’ (Robinson, 1996) was, therefore, a recognition that popular pressures for democratic change were inevitable in many regions, and an attempt to manage them.

In the 1990s, especially under Clinton, the West has adopted an increasingly clear rhetorical stance of support for democratic change, pulling the rug from under old dictators rather as Gorbachev did from under the Stalinist rulers of some east-central European states. While the United States, especially, often retains close relations with those authoritarian rulers who manage to cling to power, it is usually clear that this is a pragmatic stance which does not pre-empt support for change, as was demonstrated in the Indonesian upheaval of 1998. The European Union, moreover, has reinforced this trend by putting relatively clear democratic conditions on new entrants from east-central Europe.

Related to these trends have been two more clearly globalist democratic developments. On the one hand, democratic social movements for social justice, environmental reform and democracy have emerged, and a ‘global civil society’ has been increasingly recognised by interstate international institutions. The idea of ‘international community’, while primarily understood in interstate terms, has also been broadened increasingly to include such civil society organisations. On the other hand, formal global-democratic institutions have become something more than a dream. The European Parliament has provided the first working model of an elected transnational parliamentary body. This has encouraged the idea of a formally based ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ (as advocated, for example, by Held, 1992).

Following realist (or, for that matter, Marxist) assumptions, we might have expected the Western bloc to disintegrate once the discipline of the Cold War had gone. The post-Cold War years have indeed been ones of heightened economic competition - not only between national economies but between emerging regional economic blocs in Europe, North America and Pacific Asia. Military rivalry has been limited, however, to the disputes between the United States and Britain and France over NATO policy in the Balkans, and with Japan over ‘burden-sharing’ in the Pacific. These are hardly omens of fundamental new military rivalries between nation-states - or between imperialisms.

In the global era, established liberal-democratic states do not fight each other. But once again, it obvious that this is not simply because they are democracies, but because they are embedded in the raft of common Western and global state institutions. Indeed it is not just liberal democracies which do not fight each other: the major non-Western states (Russia, China, India, Brazil, etc.), whether democratic or not, are not likely to fight with the dominant Western powers.

Outside the Western core of global state power, however, national centres are more weakly integrated with its institutional structures, and regional institutions which might inhibit local conflicts are much weaker than they are in the core. In the Cold War era, interstate rivalries between major regional powers - such as between Russia and China, India and Pakistan and China, Indonesia and Malaysia, Iran and Iraq, Israel and the Arab states - led to wars and border incidents. While the integrative tendencies in the emerging global polity, including the democratisation trends, may increasingly inhibit wars, it clearly remains possible that such interstate rivalries will generate new wars.

It is clear that democratisation in itself is not a guarantee of war-avoidance in such conficts. Israel, the only internally democratic state in the Middle East, has also been the most belligerent; Indian democracy has been quite compatible with bellicosity towards Pakistan. Democratic as well as military governments may see war, so long as it can be kept limited and relatively cost-free, as a means of boosting popularity. Thus Yeltsin’s Russia sought a military solution in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, despite the lessons of the late-Soviet failure in Afghanistan. Only in defeat did Russia’s weak democracy penalise the regime for the new disaster, and then not decisively.

Manipulating democracy is the new trade of the old nomenklatura throughout the Soviet bloc, and especially in the successor states of the Soviet Union itself. In the Caucasus and central Asia, from Armenia and Azerbaijan to Georgia, Moldova and Tadjikistan, ruling elites - mostly but not exclusively staffed from the old regime - have won elections while, and through, waging war against neighbouring states or internal minorities. In contemporary democratising states, authoritarian-inclined regimes are likely to use electoral and military processes simultaneously to produce and reproduce their power.

Thus in the new ‘nation-states’ of Serbia (and the rump federal Yugoslavia which it dominates) and Croatia governing elites have used ‘democracy’ to legitimate war and genocide, and war and genocide to legitimate their national authority and electoral success. In both cases, of course, democratisation has been far from complete: particularly in Serbia, electoral rigging has been blatant, while in both states the freedom of opposition parties and media has been drastically restricted. Formal democracy has not seriously impeded war-making, nor war-making weakened electoral legitimation.

Indeed Kaldor (1998) explains how democratic forms have become part of the genocidal process of the ‘new wars’ of the global era. Whether waged by recognised states or by breakaway centres of power, electoral legitimation is actually part of the process of genocide. Knowing that in the global era ‘democratic’ legitimation is the path to international recognition, power-mobilisers seek to create ethnically homogenous territories in which they use identity politics and intimidation to ensure electoral majorities for their rule. Minorities or even majorities who do not fit with the rule which they seek to impose are expelled from their houses and land, villages and towns. While intimidation and low-grade violence often account for much of the process, physical abuse and even large-scale killing are also essential ingredients. After the expulsions - so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ - elections or referenda confirm the new majority’s exclusive right to the territory.

The acquisition of territory by ethnic exclusion has been supported by ‘democratic’ means in earlier periods, as Michael Mann’s contribution to this collection shows. Hitler’s accession to power on his racist programme was backed by a substantial electoral base. More recently, Israel’s expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian population was legitimated by elections held among an overwhelmingly Jewish electorate: the remaining Arab population was too numerically weak and politically cowed to pose a serious problem to the state’s legitimacy.

In contemporary state-making and annexation, electoral legitimation via universal suffrage has become almost compulsory - no longer an option of convenience for nationalists. Excluded groups cannot be simply disenfranchised. Unless very small minorities in the population, they must, at least, be confined to territories outside the electoral base - on the model of the bantustans in apartheid South Africa. Often they cannot even be tolerated as powerless minorities. Hence the process of homogenisation has frequently been taken to the point at which these groups are virtually wiped from the territory to be annexed. Up to 90 per cent of non-Serbs may have been forced from Serbian-occupied territories in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Abkhazian separatists in Georgia, claiming to represent the less than one fifth of the region’s population who were ethnically Abkhaz, managed to expel the majority in their quest for an ethnically homogenous state.

The contemporary global revolution, while universalising democracy, has therefore generated a counter-revolution which utilises democratic forms. Democracy even becomes a cloak for its antithesis, genocide. Global democratic norms actually generate incentives to those who seek to gain power through war to perpetrate it in a genocidal manner. As interstate war has declined, the dominant forms of warfare have become genocidal, directed - like the Nazi war against the Jews - against unarmed civilian populations. But whereas the Nazi campaign was a sub-text of the interstate war across Europe, in contemporary wars genocide is often the principal form of violence, civilians the prime victims. In the Second World War, civilian victims were still an overall minority. In contemporary wars, they are the vast majority. Thus are democratic principles cruelly inverted in the new wars.

Where ethnic exclusion and genocide take place, they are rarely reversed even through globally-legitimate international interventions. Intervention usually occurs (if at all) after the main phases of war and genocide, not at a point when prevention is possible. Thus large-scale intervention in Bosnia did not take place until 1995, after three years of ‘cleansing’. Serious intervention was avoided in Rwanda even though it was obvious that a relatively small force could have stemmed the mass killings. After the event, United Nations-sponsored (in Bosnia, NATO-organised) forces eventually arrived in both cases, supporting in principle the processes of return of victims and bringing criminals to international justice. All of this was of course far too little and too late, as President Clinton and Secretary-General Annans acknowledged in their apologies to the Rwandan people and government for international inaction. But a similar pattern was still followed in Kosovo in 1998.

Western states - as well as the United Nations Security Council in which less democratic states like Russia and undemocratic states like China have major voices - are often more concerned with the forms of democracy rather than the content. For example, although the Serbian genocide in Bosnia implicated virtually the entire Serbian elite and all forms of state institution, Dayton legitimated Republika Srpska , the Serbian entity produced by the genocide. The West then supported ‘moderate’ Serbian nationalists, led by Biljana Plavsic, former deputy of the indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic. She was prepared to cooperate with the ‘international community’. The West thus condoned and legitimated this ‘acceptable’ Serbian nationalism by its ethnically-cleansed electorate (only to find in late 1998 that this same electorate ungratefully turned out the West’s client in favour of an unreconstructed nationalist).

Such cases emphasise more than ever the ambiguities in the relationships between democracy, war and peace. The global revolution is doubly unfinished. First, democratic change is only very partially accomplished. In some major states, it has either not developed very far or has been blocked. Even at the beginning of the 1989-91 revolutionary period, democratic change was defeated through military repression in China. Democratic reform in the Soviet Union was pursued hesitantly by Gorbachev, who fatally failed to secure Union-wide electoral legitimation for his reforms. The fragmentation of the Union led by Yeltsin resulted largely in a seizure of power by a new set of semi-authoritarian republican elites, who were mostly wise enough to wrap themselves in the forms of democracy while conceding minimal parliamentary control. Even in central Europe, where there was more content to parliamentary democracy than in the former Soviet Union or former Yugoslavia, some authoritarian trends remained. A balance-sheet of 1989-91 in the former Communist states must conclude that it was a very partial and uneven advance for democratic reform.

Elsewhere in the world, there are similar problems in democratic change. Essentially, there are three specific limitations. Many authoritarian states have still hardly seen significant reform. In many - if not most - of those where reforms have taken place, electoral systems are not underpinned by real institutional or cultural embedding of democracy, so that authoritarianism can often be maintained or recreated in ‘democratic’ guise. Finally, in most states, although civil society has been strengthened, it remains weak compared to in the established democracies, so that it is a poor counterweight to state power.

The second way in which the global revolution remains unfinished is the weak development of globally legitimate authority and institutional frameworks. The United Nations has recovered some of its standing, which was highly compromised during the Cold War, but it is poorly developed as a global authority system. The West, and especially the United States, which remains the real centre of power, refuses to invest resources or authority in legitimate global institutions. There is a deep structural contradiction in a global order which rests not just on national and international forms in general, but so disproportionately on a particular nation-state. United States superiority sustains the deeply embedded national ideology which sees American interests as the arbiter of global change.

The rest of the West, even the rapidly-developing European Union, remains incapable of articulating globalist strategies, institutions and ideologies in a way which can spur the development of a more coherent and legitimate global order. (Although at the end of the 1990s, the world economic crisis and the new ascendancy of social democratic parties in Europe were raising the profile of this agenda a little.) The legitimacy of the Western-United Nations bloc among non-Western elites, and even more populations, is highly variable and problematic. This is not just because of the continuing authoritarianism and nationalism in many states, but also because globally dominant interests and actually existing global institutions offer so very little to most of the world’s people.

In particular, the renewed global institutions remain far too accommodating to states and parties which launch wars. They largely failed to manage the outbreak of new, genocidal wars in the 1990s, and have managed the aftermath in ways which have offered little to victimised populations. The development of international legal institutions, especially the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the proposed permanent International Criminal Court, has been important, but slow and uncertain. (The United States has scandalously refused to cede even minimal authority to the proposed court.) Although there is some evidence that the numbers of wars in Europe and the former Soviet area is declining, with the stalemating of post-Cold War conflicts (Smith, 1998), the progress of global order so far offers little hope of any fundamental advance in the control of violence.

The unfinished character of the global revolution is part of the explanation for the problems more commonly associated with globalisation in the literature. The growing integration of the world economy, especially in sectors like finance and communications, poses new problems of management and regulation which are only partially amenable to the control of national state apparatuses, and which the Western state-bloc and its institutions are too slowly tackling. The failure to recognise that a partially global economy requires correspondingly strong global institutions is another sign of the inability of Western elites to provide leadership to worldwide change, despite their pivotal position in the emergent global order. Instability in the world economy is another factor in the instability of state relations and forms in the new era.

This analysis suggests that the global revolution will only be consolidated when a stronger, more coherent new structure of state relations and forms replaces those of the national-international order which is disintegrating. Further major upheavals are inevitable before the global revolution can be consolidated in anything like a stable order, in which conflict is managed institutionally rather than erupting in widespread violence. In this sense, the contradictory relations of democracy and war are likely to continue to mark the history of the early twenty-first century.

On the one hand, there are forces in global state institutions and civil society which are pushing towards the creation of a genuine, stable democracy both within national units and in expanded global state institutions. On the other, there are powerful forces in national states and societies which will continue to use war to counter this democratic revolution, and who will abuse democratic forms to create and legitimate their power. On the evidence to date, the dominant Western state-bloc and its American centre will continue to vacillate between these contending forces, often much more concerned with their own local interests than with global principles. The demonstration that there is a causal link between democratic government within states and peaceful relations between them may support the reorientation of Western - especially American - foreign policy towards the belated promotion of democracy, but it neatly returns the primary responsibility for a peaceful world order to local state elites. In an era when Western leaders are more willing to talk global and democratic than to commit real resources and effort to the construction of global democratic institutions, this may be a reassuring doctrine.

This is a situation in which the equation of democracy and peace is more a historic promise, which we are beginning to realise through global movements and institutions, than a settled pattern which we can identify with established democratic nation-states and their inter-relations. The given historic pattern, indeed, which continues to this day, is one in which democracy has been implicated too often in war, violence and even genocide. Overcoming this legacy, rather than complacently affirming the superiority of Western democratic states, is the real challenge.

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War and democracy in the national-international era and the global transition

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What Is the Democratic Peace Theory? Definition and Examples

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The Democratic Peace Theory states that countries with liberal democratic forms of government are less likely to go to war with one another than those with other forms of government. Proponents of the theory draw on the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and, more recently, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson , who in his 1917 World War I message to Congress stated that “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Critics argue that the simple quality of being democratic in nature may not be the main reason for the historic tendency of peace between democracies.

Key Takeaways

• The Democratic Peace Theory holds that democratic countries are less likely to go to war with one another than non-democratic countries.
• The theory evolved from the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the adoption of the 1832 Monroe Doctrine by the United States.
• The theory is based on the fact that declaring war in democratic countries requires citizen support and legislative approval.
• Critics of the theory argue that merely being democratic may not be the primary reason for peace between democracies.

Democratic Peace Theory Definition

Dependent on the ideologies of liberalism , such as civil liberties and political freedom, the Democratic Peace Theory holds that democracies are hesitant to go to war with other democratic countries. Proponents cite several reasons for the tendency of democratic states to maintain peace, including:

• The citizens of democracies usually have some say over legislative decisions to declare war.
• In democracies, the voting public holds their elected leaders responsible for human and financial war losses.
• When held publicly accountable, government leaders are likely to create diplomatic institutions for resolving international tensions.
• Democracies rarely view countries with similar policies and form of government as hostile.
• Usually possessing more wealth that other states, democracies avoid war to preserve their resources.

The Democratic Peace Theory was first articulated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay entitled “ Perpetual Peace .” In this work, Kant argues that nations with constitutional republic governments are less likely to go to war because doing so requires the consent of the people—who would actually be fighting the war. While the kings and queens of monarchies can unilaterally declare war with little regard for their subjects’ safety, governments chosen by the people take the decision more seriously.

The United States first promoted the concepts of the Democratic Peace Theory in 1832 by adopting the Monroe Doctrine . In this historic piece of international policy, the U.S. affirmed that it would not tolerate any attempt by European monarchies to colonize any democratic nation in North or South America.

The democratic peace theory does not claim that democratic countries are generally more peaceful than nondemocratic countries. However, the theory’s claim that democratic countries rarely fight each other is widely regarded as true by international relations experts and further supported by history. 

Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” essay remained largely unnoticed until the mid-1980s when the American international-relations scholar Michael Doyle cited it in arguing that the “zone of peace” envisioned by Kant had gradually become reality. After the Cold War, which pitted democratic states against communist states, the democratic peace theory became one of the most studied topics of research in international relations. This research has shown that while wars between non-democracies, or between democracies and non-democracies have been common, wars between democracies have been extremely rare.

Interest in the democratic peace theory has not been limited to the halls of academia. During the 1990s, U.S. President Bill Clinton featured it in many aspects of his administration’s foreign policy of spreading democracy throughout the world. Clinton’s foreign policy asserted that if the formerly autocratic nations of Eastern Europe and the collapsed Soviet Union converted to democracy, the United States and its allies in Europe would no longer need to restrain those countries militarily because democracies do not attack each other.

The democratic peace theory similarly influenced U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. U.S. policymakers believed that a zone of democracy equaled a zone of peace and security that supported President George W. Bush’s strategy of using military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s ruthless dictatorship in Iraq. Bush’s administration hoped that the democratization of Iraq would eventually result in the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East.

Democracies and War in the 1900s

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting the Democratic Peace Theory is the fact that there were no wars between democracies during the 20th century.

As the century began, the recently ended Spanish-American War had seen the United States defeat the monarchy of Spain in a struggle for control of the Spanish colony of Cuba.

In World War I , the U.S. allied with the democratic European empires to defeat the authoritarian and fascist empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, and their allies. This led to World War II and eventually the Cold War of the 1970s, during which the U.S. led a coalition of democratic nations in resisting the spread of authoritarian Soviet communism .

Most recently, in the Gulf War (1990-91), the Iraq War (2003-2011), and the ongoing war in Afghanistan , the United States, along with various democratic nations fought to counter international terrorism by radical jihadist factions of authoritarian Islamist governments. Indeed, after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks , the George W. Bush administration based its use military force to topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq on the belief that it would bring democracy—thus peace—to the Middle East.

While the claim that democracies rarely fight each other has been widely accepted, there is less agreement on why this so-called democratic peace exists.

Some critics have argued that it was actually the Industrial Revolution that led to peace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The resulting prosperity and economic stability made all of the newly modernized countries—democratic and nondemocratic—much less belligerent toward each other than in preindustrial times. Several factors arising from modernization may have generated a greater aversion to war among industrialized nations than democracy alone. Such factors included higher standards of living, less poverty, full employment, more leisure time, and the spread of consumerism. Modernized countries simply no longer felt the need to dominate each other in order to survive.

Democratic Peace Theory has also been criticized for failing to prove a cause-and-effect relationship between wars and types of government and the ease with which definitions of “democracy” and “war” can be manipulated to prove a non-existent trend. While its authors included very small, even bloodless wars between new and questionable democracies, one 2002 study contends that as many wars have been fought between democracies as might be statistically expected between non-democracies.

Other critics argue that throughout history, it has been the evolution of power, more than democracy or its absence that has determined peace or war. Specifically, they suggest that the effect called “liberal democratic peace” is really due to “realist” factors including military and economic alliances between democratic governments.

Sources and Further Reference

• Owen, J. M.  “ How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace .” International Security (1994).
• Schwartz, Thomas and Skinner, Kiron K. (2002) “ The Myth of the Democratic Peace .” Foreign Policy Research Institute.
• Gat, Azar (2006). “ The Democratic Peace Theory Reframed: The Impact of Modernity .” Cambridge University Press.
• Pollard, Sidney (1981). “ Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 .” Oxford University Press.
• Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy
• U.S. Policy in the Middle East: 1945 to 2008
• What Is Democracy? Definition and Examples
• American Manifest Destiny and Modern Foreign Policy
• Understanding the Bush Doctrine
• What Is Interventionism? Definition and Examples
• Impacts of the Iraq War on the Middle East
• What Is a Military Dictatorship? Definition and Examples
• Sunni Versus Shiite Conflict Explained
• Why Did the United States Go to War with Iraq?
• What Is Foreign Policy? Definition and Examples
• Who Were the Democratic Presidents of the United States?
• Is Iraq a Democracy?
• National Security Definition and Examples
• What Is Public Choice Theory?
• What Is Autocracy? Definition and Examples

Democracy and Peace

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The observation that democracies rarely if ever fight each other was made by Dean Babst nearly three decades ago, but has had little impact on the literature on peace research and international relations until recently. But now every volume of the leading journals contains articles on minor and major aspects of this theme. Professional jealousy and confusion of levels of analysis are possible explanations for the late acceptance of the idea of a democratic peace, but above all it seems to have been hampered by the Cold War. Erich Weede has taken a bold step in reconsidering his own previous view and other should follow. The Cold War has ended in the real world, and it should end in peace research, too.

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‘Democracy encourages peaceful interaction among states’. Footnote 1 This proposition flourished during the Enlightenment—it was, for instance, a central part of the political debates which surrounded the American and French revolutions. As early as 1795 Immanuel Kant described a ‘pacific federation’ or ‘pacific union’ created by liberal republics. Footnote 2 Much more recently this topic has become the subject of systematic empirical observation. In this issue of JPR we publish four articles on the relationship between democracy and peace. In the first, Weede ( 1992 ) reconsiders his previously published view (1984, 1989) that extended deterrence and subordination to superpowers are the major pacifying conditions in the international system. He now joins the emerging consensus that ‘democracies do not fight each other’, that democracies have established a ‘separate peace’. Forsythe ( 1992 ), while accepting this conclusion, has a different main concern: to investigate a semi-deviant case, how democracies may substitute covert action for overt force against popularly elected governments which pursue policies strongly disliked by the United States or other major democratic powers. Sørensen ( 1992 ) accepts the Kantian vision, while wishing to retain some basic insights of neorealism. Russett/Antholis ( 1992 ) attempt to extend the coverage of the proposition that democracies rarely fight each other to the ancient Greek city-states. Two issues ago, Starr ( 1992 ) sought to link relatively recent empirical findings about the lack of war among democracies to more established theoretical ideas about pluralistic security communities (Deutsch et al. 1957 ).

These are but a few examples from a burgeoning literature. Every recent volume of the leading journals in international relations and peace research contains articles on some major or minor aspect of this theme.

The observation that democracies do not fight each other was made almost three decades ago by Babst ( 1964 , 1972 ). Footnote 3 Babst had examined data on 116 major wars from 1789 to 1941 from Wright ( 1965 ) and found that ‘no wars have been fought between independent nations with elective governments’ (1964: 10). Applying a probabilistic argument to the two world wars of this century, he concluded that it was extremely unlikely all the elective governments (10 out of the 33 independent nations participating in World War I; 14 out of 52 in World War II) should be on the same side purely by chance.

A second round of debate was initiated by Rummel ( 1983 ), who argued that ‘libertarian’ states were more peaceful and that libertarian states never fought each other. Footnote 4 His argument quickly led to rejoinders by Chan ( 1984 ), Weede ( 1984 ), and others. At the same time, Doyle ( 1983 , 1986 ) was developing an argument based on the views of Kant.

After nearly a decade of debate following Doyle’s and Rummel’s articles, there is now a near-consensus on two points: that there is little difference in the amount of war participation between democracies and non-democracies (Rummel being the major dissenter here) but that wars (or even military conflicts short of war) are non-existent (or very rare) among democracies. Indeed, several scholars have echoed Levy’s statement that this ‘absence of war between democratic states comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’ (Levy 1989 : 270). This empirical regularity has never been seriously called into question.

Enthusiasm for this remarkable finding should be tempered with an appreciation that it applies only in cases where a relatively high threshold is set for both ‘democracy’ and ‘war’. Take democracy first: Most scholars have followed (more or less) the criteria carefully specified by Small/Singer ( 1976 ): (a) free elections with opposition parties, (b) a minimum suffrage (10 %); and (c) a parliament either in control of the executive or at least enjoying parity with it. Schweller ( 1992 : 240) applauds Doyle’s definition of ‘representative government’ with the suffrage level raised to at least 30 % (and female suffrage granted within a generation of its initial demand) and further requires the government to be (d) ‘internally sovereign over military and foreign affairs’ and (e) stable (in existence for at least 3 years). He also adds (f) individual civil rights and—more controversially perhaps—(g) private property and a free-enterprise economy. Attempts to lower the thresholds in empirical studies have not been successful: During the Peloponnesian Wars, ‘democracies were slightly more likely to fight one another than to fight any other type of regime’ (Russett/Antholis 1992 : 424) even though a norm was found to be emerging among democracies against fighting other democracies. Using cross-cultural ethnographic evidence from the Human Relations Area Files, Ember et al. ( 1992 ) found more supportive evidence, but the hypothesis had to be substantially revised to be testable on these data. Footnote 5 Even in the modern age, lowering the suffrage threshold makes an anomalous case of the British-American war of 1812. Footnote 6

Lowering the threshold for war below the 1,000 battle deaths used in the Correlates of War datasets on international and extrasystemic wars also produces less clear-cut results. Maoz/Abdolali ( 1989 ) and Maoz/Russett ( 1992 ) have tested propositions about democracy and war on the dataset on ‘militarized interstate disputes’, also generated within the COW project (Gochman/Maoz 1984 ). In the latest of these studies, 15 cases of disputes between democracies have to be accounted for. To forestall criticism that war is so rare an event that ‘it is difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of pacifying conditions’ (p. 380), Weede extends his study, too, to the militarized disputes dataset. This yields one such dispute between two democracies, Finland and Norway! Weede fails to find this dispute in other comparable datasets and raises questions about the coding scheme of the militarized disputes data. However, there was in fact a dispute between Finland and Norway in 1976–77 (about German NATO forces in Norway) and this discussion also referred to the friendship treaty between Finland and the USSR, which might be invoked in the case of a new threat from Germany. It may or may not be reasonable to characterize this as a ‘militarized dispute’; in any case, such incidents are so far from war that it is unreasonable to assume they should be accounted for by the same factors. Footnote 7

‘Democracies don’t fight each other’—why was such a simple observation not made in the great classical studies of war? Richardson ( 1960 ) did not touch this topic at all. Wright ( 1965 ) dealt at some length with the relationship between democracy and war, but did not comment on the lack of war between democracies. Footnote 8 And why, when this striking regularity was noticed in the early 1960s, did it take nearly thirty years before it became widely acknowledged?

One answer to the latter question may be professional jealousy. Babst was a criminologist and generally published in journals which must be regarded as extremely obscure from a peace research point of view. Nevertheless, his second article was spotted by professional students of war. In a frequently quoted article, Small/Singer ( 1976 : 51) lampooned Babst’s finding: ‘In a less academic enterprise, a recent issue … prominently featured an analysis that allegedly ends the debate [on regime-type and foreign conflict behavior] forever.’ Such a ‘seductive proposition’ was likely ‘to be accepted uncritically by those searching for some ray of hope in the generally bleak picture of contemporary international relations’. Since they found some of Babst’s coding rules to be ‘invisible’ they generated a new dataset from their own Correlates of War project in order to examine Babst’s ‘superficially credible proposition’.

A second reason for the late acceptance may be methodological. A number of early contributions to the literature confuse the issue of a national-level proposition (democracies are more peaceful) and a dyadic-level proposition (democracies don’t fight each other). Babst argued strictly in terms of the latter (as Kant had done, 169 years earlier), but Singer & Small, in their polemic against Babst, set out to demolish in some detail a proposition of the first type, ‘the innate peacefulness of the bourgeois democracies’. Thus, Small & Singer really knocked down a straw man. But so persuasive was their article that for a long while no one pursued this lead. When Rummel joined the battle he chose to defend the very thesis that Small & Singer had disconfirmed, that ‘libertarian’ states were inherently more peaceful. This drew attention away from his second thesis on dyadic peace between libertarian states.

Despite the increasing methodological sophistication of research on international violence, the difference between a main effect and an interaction effect is not always grasped. Moreover, with an increasing number of nations, the idea of conducting research at the dyadic level—where the number of units of analysis is roughly the square of the number of nations—is not especially appealing, either to research directors or funding agencies.

While the concept of an interaction effect may be too complicated, the finding that democracies don’t fight each other may also be seen as too simple, even simplistic. In the midst of regression analyses, factor analyses, and numerous other multivariate techniques, the idea that one variable alone is a sufficient (but not necessary) condition for a state of peace in the sense of non-war seems ridiculously naive. For instance, towards the end of their article Small/Singer ( 1976 : 67) did admit that they could only find two very marginal cases of ‘bourgeois democracies’ fighting each other, but they dismissed this ‘superficial proof of the innate peacefulness of the bourgeois democracies’ with a comment that this might perhaps be accounted for by geographical proximity, since wars tended to be fought between neighbors and few democracies had common borders. This is only the first of many attempts to explain away the idea of a separate peace among democracies with reference to third variables—many of which have recently been put to rest by Maoz/Russett ( 1992 ). Testing for third variables brings the issue into the normal grind of research practice, but such tests for ‘statistical artifacts’ are less meaningful in the case of perfect or near-perfect correlations. Footnote 9 Regardless of the variables used to subdivide a population of nation-pairs, a zero in the cell for joint democracy will remain zero in any subdivision. It is possible, of course, that a third variable might be found which would account for joint democracy as well as for nonwar. But the only third variables which could perform such a feat would themselves need to have a perfect relationship with both the other variables. A little reflection should suffice to show that geographical distance is not such a variable: most wars have been between neighbors, but certainly not all. And although most democracies are not neighbors, some are. In fact, in more than 25 years of research on ‘Correlates of War’ no one has come up with any relationship nearly as strong as the dyadic relationship between democracy and nonwar. Therefore, it seems extremely unlikely that such an underlying causal factor will be identified. Of course, it will not be hard to find separate third-variable explanations for each separate peace, deterrence here, distance there, and so on. Such explanations will be advanced with particular fervor by those hostile to any quantitative analysis. Footnote 10 In fact, by their very diversity they do little to bolster the many armchair generalizations, frequently single-factor ones, about the war-making of democracies.

As far as third variables are concerned, the perfect or near-perfect correlation between democracy and nonwar in dyads should soon begin to have a very different effect: all research on the causes of war in modern times will be regarded as suspect if it is not first corrected for this factor. In fact, I would argue that most behavioral research on conditions for war and peace in the modern world can now be thrown on the scrap-heap of history, and researchers can start all over again on a new basis. Despite mental resistance to such an idea, this is exactly as it should be in a cumulative discipline. A similar caution must be exercised in formulating new hypotheses about war. For instance, a number of authors are currently urging that environmental problems are a major factor in causing war. Footnote 11 This general thesis seems extremely implausible if it is meant to include war over environmental issues between democratic countries. As Diehl ( 1992 : 340) points out, some relationships are so powerful that they supersede any other conditions for war. The proper approach here would be first to sort out the double democratic dyads and then to look at the environmental factors in outbreaks of war in the remaining dyads. Footnote 12 Ten years from now, the finding that democratic countries don’t war with each other will probably be regarded as extremely trivial in a research design—a factor to be corrected for before we get on with the real job of accounting for the wars that do occur. By then, ‘antipositivists’ who now reject the democracy-nonwar relationship may revert to their second line of defense, that quantitative research can do nothing but belabor the obvious.

A further reason for discounting the dyadic relationship between democracy and peace was that it seemed to be based, on the one hand, on rather raw empiricism (Babst, Rummel) and, on the other, on airy philosophical principles (Kant, Doyle). Schweller ( 1992 : 235) argues that much of the literature is ‘data-driven’ and Lake ( 1992 : 24) feels that ‘No theory presently exists that can account for this striking empirical regularity’. While this criticism might have been true in the 1970s, it would no longer seem to hold. Fairly elaborate theoretical arguments have been made in terms of constraints on decision-makers in democracies, in terms of democracy as an exercise in non-violent domestic conflict resolution which can be extended to international affairs if a suitable (i.e. democratic) counterpart is found, in terms of democracies seeing the mutual relationships as positive- sum rather than zero-sum, or in terms of state rent-seeking, which creates an imperialist bias in a country’s foreign policy, but less so in democracies. Footnote 13 While there is as yet no consensus on which theoretical rationale accounts best for the observed relationship—or on how to separate them empirically—there is at least no lack of convincing theories.

The apparent discrepancy between findings at the nation level and at the dyadic level also calls for explanation. Theoretically, of course, the two can easily be linked: the simplest way to do so is to assume that non-democratic nations tend to attack peaceful democratic nations and that the wars fought by democratic countries are always defensive. In this way, the war participation of the democracies becomes as high as that of the non-democracies, even though the former are more peaceful. Small/Singer ( 1976 : 66), however, found no differences between democratic and non-democratic countries with respect to war initiation. More recently, Schweller ( 1992 : 249) hypothesized ‘that only authoritarian regimes initiate preventive war and that they do so regardless of whether the challenger is democratic or authoritarian’, he found the empirical evidence to be ‘overwhelming’ from Sparta to Nazi Germany. Footnote 14 Declining democratic leaders tend to seek accommodation when faced by democratic challengers, and a defensive alliance when challenged by a nondemocracy. Schweller found Israel to be the leading candidate for a deviant case from the latter regularity—one, however, which does not contradict the main regularity that we are discussing here. Morgan/Schwebach ( 1992 : 312) also concluded ‘that democratic states are less likely to escalate disputes than are non-democracies’. Lake ( 1992 : 30), on the other hand, maintains that ‘democracies are not only less likely to wage war with each other’, but that ‘they are also significantly more likely to win the wars they fight against autocracies’, a regularity which no doubt has contributed to skepticism about the peacefulness of democracies. The debate on this and other theoretical issues will obviously continue—hopefully some of it will take place in this journal!

A fifth reason for not taking much account of the democracy-war relationship at the dyadic level is that when it was first proposed by Kant there were only three liberal regimes in existence (Switzerland, France, and the USA; Doyle 1986 : 1164). Thus, Kant’s writings might be dismissed as theoretical speculation about a hypothetical future world with no empirical evidence and without much consequence in a world of despots. In the two centuries since then a ‘separate peace’ has spread to an increasing number of states: roughly 50 for the period since 1945, according to Doyle. Not only are there more democracies around, but their numbers are increasing. When 10 % of the world’s nations were democracies (roughly the state of affairs in the 19th century) only close to 1 % of all nation-pairs were excluded from war. Footnote 15 With 50 % democracies—not an unrealistic target for the close of this century—the separate peace encompasses close to 25 % of all pairs. This, then, is the basis for the ‘obsolescence of war in the developed world’ heralded by Mueller ( 1989 ).

And finally, a more political explanation for the tardy response of the research community to the idea of the separate democratic peace: Virtually all systematic research concerned with causes of war has taken place in countries affected by the Cold War. Research attributing major importance to political democracy seemed propagandistic to many peace researchers who subscribed to a ‘third way’ in the Cold War and disliked anything that smacked of one-sided propaganda for ‘the free world’. Footnote 16 Babst’s original article was not entirely free of this preaching when it suggested that democracy was a great force for peace and that ‘diplomatic efforts at war prevention might well be directed toward further accelerating’ the growth of elective governments. Small/Singer ( 1976 : 51, n. 3) suggested, however, that Babst’s prescription ‘could, paradoxically enough, turn out to be a major stimulus to war’, an observation compatible with at least some of the rhetoric in the 1991 Gulf War. Among the potentially important policy implications of Rummel’s work on this topic, Vincent ( 1987 : 104) singled out one he clearly regarded as unsavory: ‘that American covert and overt interventions for the purpose of democratizing a society would help promote peace in the world system’. The debate about imperialism in the 1970s focused, unsurprisingly, more on the war-mongering nature of several democracies than on their peacefulness. But the idea of a democratic separate peace seemed too soft for the realists, who felt more comfortable with deterrence and strict bipolarity (and still do, as is evidenced by the doomsday predictions for Europe after the Cold War in a celebrated article by Mearsheimer 1990 ). Footnote 17 As a former member of the deterrence school of thought, Weede has taken a bold step in reconsidering his own views. Peace researchers who rejected the link between democracy and peace from a radically different paradigm should not be less forthright. The strong finding about the ‘democratic peace’ may to some extent have been a victim of the Cold War. No wonder then that it fell to an ‘innocent criminologist’ to observe that the emperors had no clothes. The Cold War has now ended in the real world; it should end in peace research, too.

This article was originally published as a ‘Focus On’ article in Journal of Peace Research 29(4): 369–376, 1992 and served as an introduction to a section with articles by Weede, Forsythe, Sørensen, and Russett/Antholis. The abstract has been added.

I would like to thank Bruce Russett, Anne Julie Semb, Harvey Starr, Erich Weede, and several members of the editorial committee of the JPR , particularly Torbjørn L. Knutsen, for excellent comments on an earlier draft. Since I am also the editor of the JPR , it is particularly appropriate to emphasize that views expressed in this column are solely the responsibility of the author.

According to Doyle ( 1986 : 1166) this empirical regularity was noted by Streit ( 1938 : 88, 90–92), but his book appears to have had little fall-out in the academic literature.

Rummel’s views had been stated earlier, in vol. 4 (1979) and vol. 5 (1981), in his magnum opus Understanding Conflict and War. In 1979 his proposition 16.11 (Joint Freedom) read: ‘Libertarian systems mutually preclude violence’ (1979: 277) and he cited Babst’s work as evidence. But this was merely one out of 33 wide-ranging propositions within a gigantic philosophical scheme summed up later (1981: 279) in his ‘Grand Master Principle’: Promote freedom with three corollaries, including no. 3: Freedom maximizes peace from violence. The immoderate pretensions of this scheme, along with Rummel’s unrelenting liberalism and extremely hawkish views on defense, may have deterred readers from noticing what was in fact the strongest proposition in the series.

The proposition tested was that internal warfare was lower in political units with widespread political participation (Ember et al. 1992 : 9).

According to Small/Singer ( 1976 : 54, n. 8) British suffrage did not exceed 3 % until 1867.

After I wrote this, Weede reported that the incident is coded as having taken place in 1965, but has no further information. Those responsible for the dataset have been unable to supply any clarification, neither have Finnish researchers whom I have consulted on this problem. Similar episodes to the one mentioned from 1976–77 did occur in the 1960s, although not as serious, and one of them could have resulted in this mysterious coding.

Wright concluded that continuous war undoubtedly favors despotism. The more democracies, therefore, the greater the value of war to the despots. ‘The greater the number of sheep, the better hunting for the wolves’ (p. 266). In a pure balance of power system, democracy probably cannot survive. However, he also noted that democracies are better suited to fight long wars because they have stronger economies.

As will be recalled, Maoz/Russett ( 1992 ) found a significant number of democratic dyads engaging not in war but in ‘militarized disputes’—otherwise their exercise would have been futile.

A good case in point—well-argued in its genre—is Cohen ( 1991 ).

For particularly clear examples, see Colinvaux ( 1980 ) and Ehrlich/Ehrlich ( 1972 ). For more skeptical views see Deudney ( 1990 , 1991 ) and Lipschutz/Holdren (1989).

Like Weede and many others, but contrary to Rummel, I refrain from concluding that the democratic peace is a deterministic relationship, thus making it possible for a single contrary case to falsify the relationship. The various points made here hold even if wars between democracies are only extremely rare and not zero. If there are deviant cases, however, it makes sense to look for third variables to account for those cases.

Lake ( 1992 : 24) conceives of the state as a profit-maximizing firm trading services (mainly protection) for revenues. Autocratic states exhort exorbitant rents at the expense of their societies and therefore tend towards imperialism.

His systematic database included great-power preventive wars from 1665.

Actually, because nations do not engage in wars with themselves, the correct percentage is (25x–100)/(x–1), where x is the number of nations in the international system. As x increases, this comes very close to 25 %. For instance, with 180 nations in the state system (a reasonable description of the present system, although there are some ambiguous cases) the percentage is 24.6. If we also assume that democratic nations are unlikely to engage in civil wars, then the percentage of pairs excluded from war in a world with 10 % democratic nations is exactly 1 %. (And, more generally, y% democratic countries yields y square % pairs excluded from war.)

Of course, many countries in the ‘free world’ were neither free nor peaceful.

A third group which may be reluctant for political reasons to acknowledge the persistence of the dyadic relationship between democracy and peace is the functional (or integrationist) school of thought. Conventional wisdom has it that the creation of the Common Market has helped preserve the peace between the traditional enemies Germany and France. Although the idea of the impossibility of war between highly interdependent countries—put forward with much fanfare by Angell (1910)—should have been thoroughly discredited by World War I, it continues to have strong backing in political thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. If the idea of a separate peace between independent democracies holds, then it has no direct bearing on war and peace if these countries continue in the present European Community, develop it into a European Union, or leave it altogether. Neither does it have any significance if additional democratic countries join a European Union or not—although this may be a good (or a bad) idea, for a number of other reasons. On the other hand, if countries with fragile democracies are allowed to join the European Community and if membership in the EC helps to stabilize their democratic government—two big ifs!—then the European Community may nevertheless function as a peace factor. The same argument can be applied to postwar Germany, Italy, and possibly other European states.

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Gleditsch, N.P. (2015). Democracy and Peace. In: Nils Petter Gleditsch: Pioneer in the Analysis of War and Peace. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03820-9_4

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Aristotle’s philosophy of equality, peace, & democracy, matt qvortrup argues that aristotle’s political philosophy is surprisingly modern..

The son of a doctor, Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Macedonia in the year 384 BC, and was educated at Plato’s Academy. When his mentor Plato died in 347 BC, the Macedonian went home and became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon. His pupil, who later gained the suffix ‘the Great’, was rather fond of his teacher, and is supposed to have said, “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”

Aristotle stayed at the court of Alexander until 335 BC, when he founded his own academy, the Lyceum, in Athens. He remained in Athens until 323 BC, when anti-Macedonian sentiments forced him to leave. “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy” he said, with reference to the execution of Socrates, and fled to the island of Chalcis, where he died a year later, in 322 BC.

Reading Aristotle is easier than you might think. Even those who are not able to read him in the original Greek cannot fail to be enamoured by his enthusiasm. A fascinating thing about Aristotle’s Politika (in English normally translated as The Politics ), for example, is the way this enormously erudite man got carried away in his lectures. For instance, Aristotle simply could not help telling his students about a certain Hippodamus, the son of Eryphon. That Fifth Century BC Athenian was “the first man not engaged in politics to speak on the subject of the best Constitution.” According to Aristotle, this first philosopher of politics was “somewhat eccentric in his general mode of life owing to his desire for distinction… [he] lived fussily, with a quantity of hair and expensive ornaments and a quantity of cheap clothes – not only in winter but also in the summer” ( The Politics II, 1268a).

This is perhaps a glimpse of how entertaining Aristotle could be when he lectured in his Lyceum – how he could spellbind his audience with seemingly irrelevant but highly entertaining anecdotes. But his aside about Hippodamus also suggests that Aristotle – the founder of psychology, political science, logic, poetics, physics, biology, and many other disciplines – had a childlike joy in telling his audience about all he knew. No wonder Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman and philosopher, noted that Aristotle’s writings were veniet flumen orationis aureum fundens – “like a pouring out of gold” ( Academia Priora , Book II). And yet we don’t even have Aristotelian treatises: his only surviving books are lecture notes.

Aristotle & Progressive Politics

What’s most engaging about Aristotle’s political philosophy is how modern and progressive he was. His considerations speak through the ages and can inspire those who read him more than 2,200 years later. Aristotle was not merely a philosopher who wrote about contemporary institutions and the ideal constitution (though he did that too); he had foresight, or so it seems today. Many of the issues he addressed are also ones that concern us: terrorism, inequality, and the dangers of excessive greed in a small class of wealthy individuals. Moreover, his solutions and analyses are remarkably relevant for our time. It’s both surprising and extraordinary how Aristotle’s science of government – his politike épistême – was based on ideals that arguably could have been expressed by activists on the left in the West today. For instance, perhaps surprisingly, the man who had tutored a king was no friend of the rich and powerful. Rather, this founder of political science boldly stated that “the truly democratic statesman must study how the multitude may be saved from extreme poverty” ( The Politics , 1320a). This makes him an inspiration to modern left-leaning progressives, who once again place equality and social justice at the heart of the political struggle. Aristotle was, it can fairly be said, a democratic socialist two thousand years before this economic doctrine was established. He insisted that “measures must be contrived that bring about lasting prosperity for all” (1320a), and like a present-day centre-left politician, he was willing to advocate the redistribution of wealth on the grounds that this would be better for the state and the nation as a whole. He even spelled out how this could be done: “The proper course,” he wrote, “is to collect all the proceeds of the revenue into a fund and distribute this in lump sums.” Indeed, he even had a policy that suggested how the needy should be “supplied with capital to start them in business” (1320a). This is not a million miles away from what enlightened liberals and social democrats espouse today. And like modern centre-left progressives, he was adamant that redistribution and state intervention not only benefitted the poor, but that this was “advantageous also for the well-to-do” (1320a).

Aristotle was not anti-business, but he was always clear that “money was brought into existence for the purpose of exchange” and not as an end in itself (1258b). He famously made a distinction between oikonomia – “the art of household management” (1258b) and kremastike – “the art of getting rich” (1253b). His misgivings about the excesses of self-interest was reflected in his policy prescriptions: “the first among the indispensable services [rendered by a state] is the superintendence of the market” (1321b), he wrote in a perhaps prescient comment on the dangers of deregulation. Who needs to read Thomas Piketty’s otherwise impressive Capital in the Twenty-First Century , or Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times , when they can read Politika ? Aristotle should be an inspiration to today’s centre-left not least because the bearded Macedonian based his political thinking on a solid foundation of morals and a concern for those with fewer resources. Indeed, this philosophical basis makes Aristotle superior to many present-day public intellectuals. Today politicians usually appeal to self-interest and utility. For Aristotle, conversely, “to seek utility everywhere is unsuited for free men” (1338b). Rather, a political science should be based on recognition that “the good life is the chief aim of society” (1278b). Hence Aristotle wrote that it is “the business of the lawgiver to create the good society.” For as he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics , the prequel to The Politics , politics, being an extension of ethics and morals, “legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, and the end of this political science must be the good for man.” ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1094a) In other words, we have politics, and we teach political philosophy, because we want to create true happiness, or eudaimonia – to achieve a state where our “actions accord with virtue ( arête ) [and] with an adequate supply of goods in a complete life.” ( Nicomachean Ethics , 1101a)

Politics is not just about self-interest and aggrandizement, then. It is about recognizing that “the state is essentially a community.” ( The Politics , 1260b) In plain words, “the state is not merely a sharing of a common locality for the purpose of preventing mutual injury and exchanging goods.” (1280b) Systems of exchange and financial matters, Aristotle admits, “are necessary preconditions of a state’s existence. Yet even if all these conditions are present, that does not make a state. For a state is a partnership of families and clans living well and its object is the full and independent life.” (1280b)

Aristotle & Political Violence

Of course, not all of Aristotle’s views have stood the test of times – his views on slavery and women are particularily problematic. But this does not mean we should disregard his philosophy. After all, few Christians agree entirely with the Bible, both Old and New Testaments; and most modern (neo-) Darwinists allow themselves to disagree with parts of the Origin of Species .

Most prominent political philosophers were strangely one- or two-dimensional. Thomas Hobbes focussed almost exclusively on peace and security; John Locke was concerned about property and liberty; and Karl Marx focussed his thinking on attacking an unjust economic system. By contrast, Aristotle, even more than Plato before him, was a political thinker who addressed all the major issues: education, equality, democracy, justice, war, peace, and social unrest. It is not least because of his interest in revolutions and uprisings that his philosophy is so relevant for present day politics and policy-making.

Political violence, revolutions and terror characterize our current political debates. These issues were also hotly discussed in Aristotle’s time. It’s remarkable that here too he reached some of the same conclusions as political scientists have discovered today. Like modern political scientists who have found that terrorism is caused by disenfranchisement, Aristotle also recognised that lack of political influence breeds anger, aggression, and ultimately violence. He wrote “men… cause revolutions when they are not allowed to share honours and if they are unjustly or insolently treated” (1316b); and “angry men attack out of revenge not out of ambition” (1311a); and he posed the rhetorical question “how is it possible for individuals who do not share in the government of the state to be friendly towards the constitution?” (1268b). The answer was, of course, negative. So, fundamentally, Aristotle was of the view that people (for him, men) who are excluded from political influence ultimately resort to violence. Niccoló Machiavelli (1470-1527) later echoed Aristotle here when he stressed that “it is necessary that republics have laws that enable the mass of the population to give vent to the hostility it feels.” For when no such mechanism exists, “extra legal methods will be employed and without doubt these will have much worse consequences than legal ones” ( Discoursi , 1531, p.102).

To maintain a peaceful political system, then, Aristotle thinks that it is necessary to involve all the citizens, for political systems endure because those in power “treat those outside the constitution well” and they do so “by bringing their leading men into the constitution” (1308a). This might seem idealistic and naïve. It is not. A recent study by one of the world’s most prominent political scientists, Arend Lijphart, found that the more democratic states – the countries where minorities are included in the process of democratic decision-making – were six times less likely to experience fatal terrorist attacks than less democratic ones ( Patterns of Democracy , 2012, p.270). While not quoting Aristotle (modern political scientists seem strangely reluctant to cite the classics), state-of-the-art political science comes to the same conclusion as Aristotle did twenty-two centuries ago.

The ancient thinker’s logic is straightforward, and his lesson is clear: more democratic engagement leads to less inequality and lower levels of violence (terrorism). It is difficult to overstate how progressive and prophetic this view is, especially when compared with what passes for public policies today. Looking back over the past fifteen years, in many countries the policies pursued have been characterised by increased surveillance (in Britain in the form of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014) and a preference for dealing with terrorism and violence through military action. The results of these policies have not been impressive, and that’s putting it mildly. If we use the figures from the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index , if we exclude Syria and Nigeria the world has seen an 80% increase in the numbers of terrorist attacks. If we include these countries there has been a seven-fold increase (statistics based on 2015 Global Terrorism Index Report ).

At a time when the favoured response to political violence is retaliation, police surveillance, and the ‘War on Terror’, it is worth reflecting on Aristotle’s line, “men attacking under the influence of anger are reckless of themselves” (1315a). Indeed, terrorists are still not deterred by the prospect of violence, as the aforementioned statistics show. It is arguably testament to the greatness of Aristotle that he recognised that it is citizen engagement and political influence, and not force, which prevent social violence and political strife. And it is indicative of his empiricist approach that he sought proof for his assertions in actual facts.

Aristotle & Constitutional Democracy

Aristotle, always the empiricist, collected everything from zoological specimens to political facts: he wrote commentaries on an estimated 170 ancient constitutions. Unfortunately, only one of these is preserved, the Constitution of Athens , discovered in Oxyrhynchus in Upper Egypt in 1879.

It is not surprising, given his obsession with facts, that Aristotle’s main proof of the beneficial influence of what he called “the democratic nature” (1308a) was drawn from his empirical studies; and especially from a comparative analysis with the remarkable democratic state of Carthage. Aristotle wrote that the proof that “its constitution is well regulated is that its populace willingly remain faithful to the political system, and that neither civil strife has arisen in any degree, nor yet a tyrant” (1272b). That Carthage was successful in avoiding revolutions and what we today would call ‘terrorism’ he says was due to its balanced constitution, one in which its parliament – ‘the Hundred and Four’ – were elected “from any class” and “by merit” (1272b). Further, in this surprisingly democratic system, the elected representatives were balanced by ‘the Elders’ – chosen by the people and by a head of government who “as a superior feature was elected” (1272b).

While Aristotle warned that government by the people could degenerate into mob rule, he maintained throughout that it is “advantageous for the form of democracy… for all the citizens to elect the magistrates and to call them to account” (1318b). Indeed, he even spoke about the “consent of the governed” (1318b) – a line later copied by Thomas Jefferson into the American Declaration of Independence.

Aristotle’s model constitution was in fact one characterised by an elected aristocracy – but an aristocracy based on uncommon prudence and intelligence, not on wealth. But even under this system of government, the people would have a greater say than under most systems of indirect democracy: in Aristotle’s ideal state, “when the Kings introduce business in the assembly, they do not merely let the people sit and listen to the decisions that have been taken by their rulers, but the people have the sovereign decision” (1278a).

Why did this intellectual snob place such faith in the ordinary people? Why did he trust them to make good decisions? He recognised that some are more intelligent than others; but also acknowledged that many individuals deliberating together would have a greater combined knowledge than even the wisest person. His argument here is worth quoting at length:

“It is possible that the many, when they come together, may be better, not individually but collectively, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost. For where there are many, each individual, it may be argued, has some portion of virtue and wisdom, and when they have come together, just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellectual faculties.” (1281b)

This, he concluded, “is why the general public is a better judge,” for “different men can judge a different part” (1281b). For this reason, “it is necessary for all to share alike in ruling and being ruled.” (1332b)

It is difficult to find a more precise and succinct case for democracy than this. True, the same sentiment was expressed by the likes of Marsilius of Padua (1275-1343). “Laws” wrote that Italian in 1324, “should be laid before the assembled citizen-body for approval or rejection… for the less learned citizen can sometimes perceive something that should be corrected with regard to a proposed law even though they would not have known how to discover [the law] in the first place” ( The Defender of the Peace , p.80). But we ought to remember that this thinker, like Machiavelli, was brought up on a solid dose of Aristotle’s teachings and steeped in his writings. Both men had learned from the Macedonian master – just as we ought to do today.

Aristotle speaks through the ages. His writings are proof, if such is needed, that the philosophy of the ancient masters is not a historical relic but a timeless guide. A democrat, a defender of social equality, and an opponent of the authoritarian state, Aristotle should be on the reading list for all those who support radical or progressive causes.

© Dr Matt Qvortrup 2016

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. This article is a shorter version of his inaugural professorial address, which he’ll give in Coventry on 12th October.

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Historians for Peace and Democracy

New essays on the u.s. foreign policy history & resource guide website.

July 12, 2021 Roger Peace Uncategorized 0

Clio, the Greek Muse of History, prepares to record the next chapter of U.S. history (Udo Keppler 1899, adapted)

Three new essays have been added to the U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide website:  “ Introduction:  The Fifth Estate ,” “ The U.S. and World War II ,” and “ Africa and the War on Terror .”

The website, now with 13 essays, covers the nation’s wars, military interventions, and major doctrines over the course of more than two centuries.  Written for the general public and students, each entry draws on the work of experts in the area of study, summarizing major developments, analyzing causes and contexts, and providing links to additional information and resources.  This is a history about the United States’ role in the world, but it does not define “success” and “progress” in terms of the advancement of national power and interests.

The U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide is an open resource educational website, established in 2016 and sponsored by the Historians for Peace and Democracy and the Peace History Society.  It may be used by professors and teachers to enhance their course curricula.

Introduction: The Fifth Estate by Roger Peace

How is history written?  Why do historians differ in their interpretations?  What are the main differences in writing the history of U.S. foreign relations?  These are questions answered in “Introduction: The Fifth Estate.”  The title conveys the idea that the history profession has a responsibility to the public to question official rationales, search out the truth, and present an accurate and honest accounting of the past – in the interest of democratic accountability.

The argument here is not against nationalistic bias per se, but rather against the exclusion, minimalization, and whitewashing of egregious foreign policies in order to conform to, or at least not contradict, celebratory U.S. history.  Nationalistic bias descends into whitewashing when it (1) fails to cross-examine official rationales and ideological assumptions, (2) ignores the harm done to others by foreign policies, and (3) omits dissenting voices and alternative courses of action available at the time.

Historians of the progressive tradition have voiced ample criticism of U.S. foreign policies, but the diplomatic history field as a whole has been immobilized by a lack of agreement on fundamental interpretations.  What lessons, after all, should be conveyed to the public and to political leaders?  If, on the one hand, as many nationalist-minded historians have argued, Pax Americana has produced a stable, peaceful international order for the last seven decades, then, by all means, let it continue.  If, on the other hand, U.S. foreign policies have been characterized by unnecessary wars, rogue operations, propaganda, and obstruction of a more cooperative international order, then reform is in order; it is time to create something new.

The U.S. and World War II by Jeremy Kuzmarov and Roger Peace

The Second World War is popularly remembered as “the good war” in American history, an heroic struggle against fascist totalitarian states.  America’s adversaries indeed fit this characterization, with Nazi Germany committing some of the most heinous atrocities the world has ever seen.  Yet if we scrutinize the origins and conduct of this war, we see that it was not entirely a righteous one for the victorious Allies.

Typically overlooked is the U.S. policy of appeasement toward fascism during the interwar years, a policy well-documented in U.S. governmental records.  U.S. officials supported Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and were conciliatory toward German dictator Adolf Hitler until March 1939, operating under the assumption that fascism was a force for stability and a bulwark against communism.  Also overlooked is the role of U.S.-based corporations in Nazi Germany, including General Motors, Ford, Standard Oil Company, IBM, and Chase Manhattan Bank.

Another avenue explored in the essay is the U.S. response to German repression of Jews.  While American Jewish leaders organized public demonstrations and boycotts against Nazi Germany, the U.S. State Department under Cordell Hull withheld public criticism and refused to increase immigration quotas.  By June 1939, three months before WWII broke out in Europe, the waiting list of Germans and Austrians seeking entry in the U.S. had grown to 309,782.

The war itself is discussed from both a bird’s eye view of overarching strategies and a worm’s eye view of fighting in the fields, as described in numerous soldier diaries and correspondent reports.  The role of the Soviet Union is emphasized, as the Red Army turned the tide of the war in January 1943.  In the Pacific theater, as the historian John W. Dower attests, “Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race hate.”  Racial prejudice was also directed at American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry.  A presidential order forced 120,000 people living in West Coast States to live in barren internment camps for the duration of the war.

The essay also discusses the Truman administration’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Seven out of eight top U.S. military commanders believed that the use of atomic bombs was unnecessary from a strategic-military vantage point.  The main inhibition to Japanese surrender was retainment of the emperor, which was granted in the end.  The bombings were unnecessary.

Africa and the War on Terror by Elizabeth Schmidt

“To understand the war on terror in Africa, it must be placed in historical context,” writes Elizabeth Schmidt, author of Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror  (2018), and Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror  (2013).  “After 9/11, the Bush administration expanded unconventional military actions in Africa, deploying U.S. Special Operations Forces and launching unmanned drones outside of established war zones.”  In 2007, the U.S. established the U.S. Africa Command, signaling the growing importance of Africa in U.S. geopolitical calculations.

Schmidt offers a cogent analysis of how U.S. leaders mislabeled disparate civil disturbances in African countries as “terrorism,” then emphasized military “solutions.”  Rather than reduce terrorism, U.S. military actions strengthened autocratic regimes, exacerbated human rights abuses, and undermined the goals they purported to promote.  Schmidt also dispels some common misconceptions about Islam, noting that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide condemn terrorism.

– Roger Peace, website initiator and coordinator

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Guest Essay

Why Losing Political Power Now Feels Like ‘Losing Your Country’

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Is partisan hostility so deeply enmeshed in American politics that it cannot be rooted out?

Will Donald Trump institutionalize democratic backsliding — the rejection of adverse election results, the demonization of minorities and the use of the federal government to punish opponents — as a fixture of American politics?

The literature of polarization suggests that partisan antipathy has become deeply entrenched and increasingly resistant to amelioration.

“Human brains are constantly scanning for threats to in-groups,” Rachel Kleinfeld , a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a September 2023 essay, “ Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says .”

“As people affectively polarize, they appear to blow out-group threats out of proportion, exaggerating the out-group’s dislike and disgust for their own group, and getting ready to defend their in-group, sometimes aggressively,” Kleinfeld argued.

Kleinfeld acknowledged that “a number of interventions have been shown in lab settings, games and short experiments to reduce affective intervention in the short term,” but, she was quick to caution, “reducing affective polarization through these lab experiments and games has not been shown to affect regular Americans’ support for antidemocratic candidates, support for antidemocratic behaviors, voting behavior or support for political violence.”

Taking her argument a step further, Kleinfeld wrote:

Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.

Yphtach Lelkes , a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, succinctly described by email the hurdles facing proposed remedies for polarization and antidemocratic trends:

I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.

The reality, Lelkes continued, is that “a fish rots from the head, and political elites are driving any democratic backsliding that is occurring in America. Most Republican voters do not support the antidemocratic policies and practices of their elected officials.”

In their March 2024 paper, “ Uncommon and Nonpartisan: Antidemocratic Attitudes in the American Public ,” Lelkes, Derek E. Holliday and Shanto Iyengar , both of Stanford, and Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth found that public opposition to antidemocratic policies is not adequate to prevent their adoption:

More ominous implications of our results are that 1) public support is not a necessary precondition for backsliding behavior by elites, and 2) Americans, despite their distaste for norm violations, continue to elect representatives whose policies and actions threaten democracy. One explanation is that when partisanship is strong, voters place party and policy goals over democratic values. Indeed, one of the least-supported norm violations — removing polling places in outparty-dominated areas — has already been violated by elected officials in Texas, and there are concerns about pending similar laws in other states. Such unconstrained elite behavior suggests that threats to democracy could well manifest themselves in both parties in the future.

The level of public support for democratic institutions will be a crucial factor in the 2024 elections. President Biden is campaigning on the theme that Trump and his MAGA allies are intent on strengthening authoritarian leadership at the expense of democracy.

Political scientists and reform groups seeking to restore collegiality to political debate and elections have experimented with a wide variety of techniques to reduce partisan hostility and support for antidemocratic policies.

These efforts have raised doubts among other election experts, both about their effectiveness and durability. Such experts cite the virulence of the conflicts over race, ethnicity and values and the determination of Trump and other politicians to keep divisive issues in the forefront of campaigns.

I have written before about the largest study of techniques to lessen polarization, which was conducted by Jan G. Voelkel and Robb Willer , sociologists at Stanford, along with many other colleagues. Voelkel and Willer are the primary authors of “ Megastudy Identifying Effective Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes .” Given the heightened importance of the coming election and the potential effects of polarization on it, their study is worth re-evaluating.

Voelkel, Willer and 83 others

conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs. We also identify several interventions that reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views — showing that antidemocratic attitudes, although difficult to move, are not intractable.

Their own data and their responses to my inquiries suggest, however, that the optimism of their paper needs to be tempered.

In the case of the “six interventions that significantly reduced partisan animosity,” the authors reported that two weeks later “the average effect size in the durability survey amounted to 29 percent of the average effect size in the main survey.”

I asked Voelkel to explain this further, posing the question: “If the initial reduction in the level of partisan animosity was 10 percentage points, does the 29 percent figure indicate that after two weeks the reduction in partisan animosity was 2.9 percentage points?” Voelkel wrote back to say yes.

In an email responding to some of my follow-up questions about the paper, Voelkel wrote:

I do not want to overstate the success of the interventions that we tested in our study. Our contribution is that we identify psychological strategies for intervening on partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes in the context of a survey experiment. We still need to test how big the effects could be in a large-scale campaign in which the psychological mechanisms for reducing partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes get triggered not once (as in our study) but ideally many times and over a longer period.

Voelkel cautioned that “one-time interventions might not be enough to sustainably reduce affective polarization in the mass public. Thus, successful efforts would need to be applied widely and repeatedly to trigger the psychological mechanisms that are associated with reductions in affective polarization.”

Willer sent a detailed response to my queries by email:

First, to be clear, we do not claim that the interventions we tested have large enough effects that they would cure the problems they target. We do not find evidence for that. Far from it. I would characterize the results of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge in a more measured way. We find that many of the interventions we tested reliably, meaningfully and durably reduce both survey and behavioral indicators of partisan animosity.

Willer wrote that “the interventions we tested were pretty effective in reducing animosity toward rival partisans, particularly in the short term. However, we found that the interventions we tested were substantially less effective in reducing antidemocratic attitudes, like support for undemocratic practices and candidates.”

Other scholars were more skeptical.

I asked Lilliana Mason , a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a leading scholar of affective polarization: “Are there methods to directly lessen polarization? Are they possible on a large, populationwide scale?”

“If we knew that,” she replied by email, “we would have definitely told people already.”

There is evidence, Mason continued, that

it is possible to correct misperceptions about politics by simply providing correct information. The problem is that this new correct information doesn’t change people’s feelings about political candidates or issues. For example, you can correct a lie told by Donald Trump, and people will believe the new correct information, but that won’t change their feelings about Trump at all.

“We think of affective polarization as being extremely loyal to one side and feeling strong animosity toward the other side,” Mason wrote, adding:

This can be rooted in substantive disagreements on policy, identity-based status threat, safe versus dangerous worldview, historical and contemporary patterns of oppression, violations of political norms, vilifying rhetoric, propagandistic media and/or a number of other influences. But once we are polarized, it’s very difficult to use reason and logic to convince us to think otherwise.

Similarly, “there are methods that reduce polarization in academic research settings,” Westwood, an author of the March paper cited above, wrote by email. He continued:

The fundamental problems are that none “cure” polarization (i.e., move the population from negative to neutral attitudes toward the opposing party), none last more than a short period of time and none have a plausible path to societywide deployment. It is impossible to reach every American in need of treatment, and many would balk at the idea of having their political attitudes manipulated by social scientists or community groups.

More important, in Westwood’s view, is that

whatever techniques might exist to reduce citizen animosity must be accompanied by efforts to reduce hostility among elected officials. It doesn’t matter if we can make someone more positive toward the other party if that effect is quickly undone by watching cable news, reading social media or otherwise listening to divisive political elites.

Referring to the Voelkel-Willer paper, Westwood wrote:

It is a critically important scientific study, but it, like nearly all social science research, does not demonstrate that the studied approaches work in the real world. Participants in this study were paid volunteers, and the effects were large but not curative. (They reduced partisan hatred and did not cure it.) To fix America’s problems, we need to reach everyone from fringe white nationalists to single moms in Chicago, which is so costly and logistically complicated that there isn’t a clear path toward implementation.

One problem with proposals designed to reduce partisan animosity and antidemocratic beliefs, which at least three of the scholars I contacted mentioned, is that positive effects are almost immediately nullified by the hostile language in contemporary politics.

“The moralized political environment is a core problem,” Peter Ditto , a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, wrote by email:

Unless we can bring the temperature down in the country, it is going to be hard to make progress on other fronts, like trying to debias citizens’ consumption of political information. The United States is stuck in this outrage spiral. Partisan animosity both fuels and is fueled by a growing fact gap between red and blue America.

Ditto argued that there is “good evidence for the effectiveness of accuracy prompts (correcting falsehoods) to reduce people’s belief in political misinformation,” but “attempting to reduce political polarization with accuracy prompts alone is like trying to start a mediation during a bar fight.”

Attempts to improve political decision making, Ditto added, “are unlikely to have a substantial effect unless we can tamp down the growing animosity felt between red and blue America. The United States has gone from a politics based on disagreement to one based on dislike, distrust, disrespect and often even disgust.”

Citing the Voelkel-Willer paper, Jay Van Bavel , a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., emailed me to express his belief that “there are solid, well-tested strategies for reducing affective polarization. These are possible on a large scale if there is sufficient political will.”

But Van Bavel quickly added that these strategies “are up against all the other factors that are currently driving conflict and animosity, including divisive leaders like Donald Trump, gerrymandering, hyperpartisan media (including social media), etc. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic.”

Simply put, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attempt to counter polarization at a time when partisan sectarianism is intense and pervasive.

Bavel described polarization as

both an illness from various problems in our political system and an outcome. As a result, the solution is going to be extremely complex and involve different leadership (once Trump and his inner circle leave the scene, that will help a lot), as well as a number of structural changes (removing gerrymandering and other incentive structures that reinforce extremism).

Affective polarization, Bavel added,

is really just a disdain for the other political party. Political sectarianism seems to be an even worse form because now you see the other party as evil. Both of these are, of course, related to ideological polarization. But affective polarization and political sectarianism are different because they can make it impossible to cooperate with an opponent even when you agree. That’s why they are particularly problematic.

Stanley Feldman , a political scientist at Stony Brook University, pointed to another characteristic of polarization that makes it especially difficult to lower the temperature of the conflict between Republicans and Democrats: There are real, not imaginary, grounds for their mutual animosity.

In an email, Feldman wrote:

There is a reality to this conflict. There has been a great deal of social change in the U.S. over the past few decades. Gay marriage is legal, gender norms are changing, the country is becoming more secular, immigration has increased.

Because of this, Feldman added:

it’s a mistake to suggest this is like an illness or disease. We’re talking about people’s worldviews and beliefs. As much as we may see one side or the other to be misguided and a threat to democracy, it’s still important to try to understand and take seriously their perspective. And analogies to illness or pathology will not help to reduce conflict.

There are, in Feldman’s view,

two major factors that have contributed to this. First, national elections are extremely competitive now. Partisan control of the House and Senate could change at every election. Presidential elections are decided on razor-thin margins. This means that supporters of each party constantly see the possibility of losing power every election. This magnifies the perceived threat from the opposing party and increases negative attitudes toward the out-party.

The second factor?

The issues dividing the parties have changed. When the two parties fought over the size of government, taxes and social welfare programs, it was possible for partisans to imagine a compromise that is more or less acceptable even if not ideal. Compromise on issues like abortion, gender roles, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the role of religion is much more difficult, so losing feels like more of a threat to people’s values. Feldman continued:

From a broader perspective, these issues, as well as immigration and the declining white majority, reflect very different ideas of what sort of society the United States should be. This makes partisan conflict feel like an existential threat to an “American” way of life. Losing political power then feels like losing your country. And the opposing parties become seen as dangers to society.

These legitimately felt fears and anxieties in the electorate provide a fertile environment for elected officials, their challengers and other institutional forces to exacerbate division.

As Feldman put it:

It’s also important to recognize the extent to which politicians, the media, social media influencers and others have exacerbated perceptions of threat from social change. Take immigration, for example. People could be reminded of the history of immigration in the U.S.: how immigrants have contributed to American society, how second and third generations have assimilated, how previous fears of immigration have been unfounded. Instead there are voices increasing people’s fear of immigration, suggesting that immigrants are a threat to the country, dangerous and even less than human. Discussions of a “great replacement” theory, supposed attacks on religion, dangers of immigration and changing gender norms undermining men’s place in society magnify perceptions of threat from social change. Cynical politicians have learned that they can use fear and partisan hostility to their political advantage. As long as they think this is a useful strategy, it will be difficult to begin to reduce polarization and partisan hostility.

In other words, as long as Trump is the Republican nominee for president and as long as the prospect of a majority-minority country continues to propel right-wing populism, the odds of reducing the bitter animosity that now characterizes American politics remain slim.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall

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Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Their Voices for Palestine, Oppose the “False Idol of Zionism”

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• Naomi Klein award-winning writer and activist.

Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”

More from this Interview

• Part 1: “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel”: 100s Arrested at Jewish-Led Protest Near Schumer’s Home
• Part 2: Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Their Voices for Palestine, Oppose the “False Idol of Zionism”

AMY GOODMAN : Among those who addressed the crowd during the seder was award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein. This is some of what she had to say.

NAOMI KLEIN : My friends, I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. The ecofeminist in me has always been uneasy about this story. What kind of god is jealous of animals? What kind of god wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is, of course, a less literal way of understanding this story. It is a lesson about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shining, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.

What I want to say to you this evening at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the Promised Land, a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe, and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba. From the start, it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a seder, it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and unfreedom and client state. From the start, it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, much as the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites and thus ordered the death of their sons. And as we know, Moses was saved from that by being put in a basket and adopted by an Egyptian woman.

Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments — “Thou shall not kill,” “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not covet” — the commandments brought down from the mount. It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value that we place on questioning a practice embedded in the seder itself with its four questions asked by the youngest child. It also betrays the love that we have as a people for text and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars, journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.

Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them —

CROWD : Shame!

NAOMI KLEIN : — students embodying the spirit of the seder, asking the most basic question, asking questions like “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say it ends here. Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations. Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder, the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with — we don’t need walls. We need no temple, no rabbi. And there is a role for everyone, including especially the smallest child. The seder is portable, a diaspora technology if ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.

So, tonight — so, look around. This here is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with the murderous, theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and the donations.

That is a false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made and the world that made him. It’s Zionism. What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, we are the exodus, the exodus from Zionism. So, to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say, “Let our people go.” We say, “We have already gone, and your kids, they are with us now.”

AMY GOODMAN : Award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, speaking at what was called the “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on Tuesday at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, a block from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home. Special thanks to Hana Elias, Eric Halvarson and Ishmael Daro of Democracy Now!

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‘The Age of Magical Overthinking’ tries to pinpoint our mental health crisis

Amanda montell casts a wide net in her new essay collection. maybe too wide..

Every generation has its own crisis, the linguist and podcaster Amanda Montell writes. In the 1960s and ’70s, young Americans organized against “physical tyrannies” such as voter suppression and workplace discrimination. But times have changed.

The 21st century brought a shift in our attention from external threats to internal ones, Montell says. Rates of anxiety and depression among U.S. teens and adults have spiked. Loneliness is a public health threat . We’re glued to our phones, alienated from loved ones and surrounded by misinformation.

People everywhere, Montell writes, are facing a crisis of the mind.

From this grim landscape emerges “ The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality ,” Montell’s third book and a sweeping look at mental health, behavioral science, misinformation and online culture in the 2020s. In it, she argues that the ills of the internet era are best explained by looking back on humanity’s history, when our minds developed shortcuts to improve our odds of survival. Those shortcuts are called cognitive biases, and they may lead us to do strange things like fall for a conspiracy theory or accept mental health advice from an untrained influencer .

Montell leads us through an engaging roundup of “21st century derangement,” from celebrity worship to tradwife discourse , examining how cognitive biases may contribute. But by positioning her work as a response to America’s broad struggle with mental health, Montell promises more than she delivers. Rather than focusing on a tour of our shared cognitive glitches, she juggles meta-commentary on such vast topics as the modern mind and the internet, dropping balls along the way.

The book opens with an account of Montell’s struggles with anxiety and overwhelm, as well as the steps she took to feel better. “My most cinematic attempt at mental rehab involved picking herbs on a farm in Sicily under a light-pollution-free sky,” she writes.

Eventually, she had an aha moment: The same cognitive biases she encountered while researching toxic social groups for her second book, “ Cultish ,” could explain why the internet age felt like a “mass head trip.” Glutted with more information in a day than we can ever hope to process, we fall back on mental habits developed when humans were simpler creatures, Montell writes. For example, social media celebrity worship could be fueled by the “halo effect,” where we assume a person with one good quality (writing hit pop songs) has other good qualities (a perfectly tuned moral compass). Or perhaps we spend hours comparing ourselves with other people on Instagram because the “zero-sum bias” has convinced us that life is a game of winners and losers.

Montell backs up her connections in many instances with nods to evolutionary biology. For early humans, it made sense to attach ourselves to the strongest and most powerful, so now we glom onto Taylor Swift or Charli XCX. Resources like mates and status were limited in ancient human communities, Montell notes, so it’s natural that we view hot people on Instagram as immediate threats to our survival.

Montell finds examples of cognitive bias in internet culture flash points, such as the millennial obsession with New Age therapy-speak. Faced with big problems, such as anxiety or depression, our minds seek big explanations, such as childhood trauma or a scarcity mind-set, rather than examining all the smaller problems at play.

In other spots, she shares stories from her own life. In her late 20s, she struggled to end an abusive relationship, terrified that giving up meant she’d wasted years of her life — a classic “sunk cost fallacy.” Humans are social creatures, Montell notes, afraid of inviting scrutiny by admitting mistakes.

“My hope is for these chapters to make some sense of the senseless,” Montell says early on. “To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in.” And indeed, in some moments, her sharp descriptions of behavioral foibles and her talent for cutting through doublespeak clear room for hope: Maybe noticing our warped thinking will make its effects less painful. Maybe our generational “crisis” is a story of not-enough-neurons encountering too-many-terabytes.

When confidence in Montell’s analysis wavers, it’s because the targets are too broad, the claims imprecise. For instance, we’re never quite sure of the shape of the national mental health crisis she repeatedly references. Early on, she draws a distinction between Americans’ current mental health struggles and 20th-century battles against bodily oppression. This neat separation doesn’t reflect reality — “The Age of Magical Overthinking” was published after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and during ongoing fights for voter access, health care and the right to protest. It also doesn’t reflect what science has shown about illnesses like depression, which are often tied up with a person’s physical and political well-being. Ultimately, we’re left with the sense that Montell’s crisis of the mind begins and ends with the vague feelings of anxiety and dread many people feel after scrolling on social media apps.

Montell implies that the breakdown of Americans’ mental health began after 2000, brought on by internet access and introspection. Conflating “the internet” with social media, she draws loose connections between online scrolling and mental turmoil, making no reference to the complicated science around how social media use affects our brains. Some studies have found bumps in anxiety and depression associated with social media use, but more recent meta-analyses call their methods and findings into question . To date, researchers have found no consistent causal link between spending time on social apps and experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Of course, future research may uncover new ways to measure how social media use or other online activities affect the mental health of different populations. Perhaps we should rely on a different measure altogether, like qualitative research into young people and their families. Rather than critique the existing science or offer an alternative lens, Montell picks two studies that support her thesis and hand-waves at the dire state of things.

Finally, although Montell says cognitive biases affect everyone, she aims her jabs at the safest of targets: “Disney adults,” “male girlbosses,” “Facebook-addicted Karens.” Readers hoping for fresh or counterintuitive takes on internet culture — and its heroes and villains — may walk away disappointed.

Montell says from the jump that her analysis of 2020s malaise is “not a system of thought,” likening her work instead to a Buddhist koan — meant to be pondered, not understood. That’s fine, and “The Age of Magical Overthinking” ultimately features interesting topics, fun research and vivid stories. But in Montell’s effort to critique the spirit of our times, she asks imprecise questions and offers unsatisfactory answers.

Tatum Hunter is a consumer technology reporter at The Washington Post based in San Francisco. Her work focuses on health, privacy and relationships in the internet era.

The Age of Magical Overthinking

Notes on Modern Irrationality

By Amanda Montell

Atria/One Signal. 272 pp. $28.

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