Bones of democratic contention: Maritime disputes

Abstract

While no two democratic states have fought an interstate war against each other, democratic dyads experience militarized disputes with some frequency. Previous research suggests that a large percentage of militarized disputes between two democracies involve fishing and oil resources of the sea. Yet this research selects on cases where militarized conflict occurs, and fails to consider whether democracies have more frequent diplomatic conflicts over maritime areas relative to other regime pairings. Analyzing data from the Issue Correlates of War project, which includes diplomatic conflicts over maritime areas (1900–2007) in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia, this study finds that pairs of democracies have the highest chance of experiencing diplomatic maritime disputes among all pairs of countries in the same region or dyads involving major powers. Three theoretical explanations were empirically evaluated to account for this pattern: (a) greater opportunities for democratic maritime conflicts given higher levels of economic productivity and the sizes of fishing fleets in democratic states, (b) the increasing securitization of maritime issues, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and (c) variations in the number of democracies across regional contexts. Several illustrative case studies for each theoretical argument are presented. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the democratic peace literature and the law of the sea regime.