Abstract
The liberal argument that democratic political structures form a precondition for stable peace orders in International Relations has become conventional wisdom among Western policy-makers. Immanuel Kant’s postulate developed in his ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795/1991) has been empirically substantiated. Peace and conflict research has reached a consensus that democracies rarely fight each other (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 1991; Chan, 1993; Russett, 1993). But the ‘democratic peace’ only forms one part of the empirical finding. Democracies are Janus-faced. While they do not fight each other, they are frequently involved in militarized disputes and war with authoritarian regimes. Democratic peace despite warlike democracies?
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