Use the Forces, Luke: Soldiers and the Democratic Peace

Abstract

Civil–Military Dynamics, Democracy, and International Conflict: A New Quest for International Peace. By Seung–Whan Choi, Patrick James. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 224 pp., $69.95 (ISBN: 1-4039-6485-8). Civil–Military Dynamics, Democracy, and International Conflict is an ambitious and methodologically sophisticated, but conceptually underdetermined, monograph. In it, Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James propose to extend recent advances in the democratic peace literature. Focusing on Bruce Russett and John Oneal's (2001) blending of systemic and dyad-specific variables, they seek in particular to fill what they identify as two conceptual lacunae in the democratic peace literature: the impact of military influence and political communications, respectively, on policy. Unfortunately, the book suffers from too much ambition and too little conceptual clarity. Choi and James simply attempt to do too much, with too little, in too many scholarly domains—including formal models of decision making, civil–military relations, the democratic peace, crisis bargaining, and formal models of conflict, among others. Their ambitions exceed the empirical evidence they bring to bear. Moreover, their variables are poorly operationalized, and they spend far too little time theorizing about civil–military relations and political communications to do justice to either concept. Advanced graduate students and formal modelers will find their application of neural network models to be technically interesting. However, students of the democratic peace and of civil–military relations will find little to commend this slim volume. Choi and James start with an important theoretical puzzle. Whatever the “peace-proneness” of democracies might be, they ask, if soldiers exercise decisive influence over foreign policy decision making, will their professional “war-proneness” override democracy's peace-proneness? In asking this question, …