Peace Hypothesis Research Articles

The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies

A major goal in evolutionary biology is to elucidate common principles that drive human and other animal societies to adopt either a warlike or peaceful nature. One proposed explanation for the variation in aggression between human societies is the democratic peace hypothesis. According to this theory, autocracies are more warlike than democracies because autocratic leaders can pursue fights for private gain. However, autocratic and democratic decision-making processes are not unique to humans and are widely observed across a diverse range of non-human animal societies. We use evolutionary game theory to evaluate whether the logic of democratic peace may apply across taxa; specifically adapting the classic Hawk-Dove model to consider conflict decisions made by groups rather than individuals. We find support for the democratic peace hypothesis without mechanisms involving complex human institutions and discuss how these findings might be relevant to non-human animal societies. We suggest that the degree to which collective decisions are shared may explain variation in the intensity of intergroup conflict in nature.

Beyond Clueless Mothers: Israeli “Women Wage Peace” Activists’ Perceptions of Why Women Are Key to Peacemaking

Abstract Focusing on a contemporary peace movement in Israel, Women Wage Peace (WWP), this article studies female Jewish and Arab-Palestinian activists to understand if/why they believe in women’s peacefulness and why they chose a women-led movement. While not challenging the idea of women’s peacefulness, the activists’ testimonies shed light on various explanations behind the “women and peace hypothesis,” beyond maternal arguments. Despite a militaristic/patriarchal context where maternal collective action frames are culturally resonant, some activists refuse to be reduced to one-dimensional mothers. The article also finds that through caring practices, WWP creates a unique feeling of belonging, including for Arab-Palestinian activists experiencing a deficit of belonging. The article draws on qualitative methodologies, interviews, and ethnographic work conducted in 2019–2020. Implications include the value for women’s peace movements to use both maternal and feminine collective action frames, decoupled from motherhood, and to actively create “safe spaces” where women feel that they belong.

한국인의 통일의식에서의 성차 검증 : 여성평화가설의 적용

본 연구는 여성평화가설에 기반하여 우리 국민의 통일의식에서의 성차를 검증하였다. 구체적으로는 여성의 모성 경험, 사회ㆍ경제적 조건에 대한 인식, 그리고 페미니스트 의식 수준을 통일에 대한 태도와 연계한 후 2019년 통일의식조사 자료를 사용해 분석하였고, 다음과 같은 결과를 얻었다. 첫째, 여성은 자신을 사회경제적으로 높은 계층으로 인식할수록 통일의 필요성을 덜 느끼지만 같은 조건의 남성보다 통일의 필요성에 대해서는 덜 부정적이었다. 둘째, 페미니스트 의식 수준이 높을수록 통일편익 주장에 긍정적이었고, 김정은 정권을 대화와 타협이 가능한 상대로 여기는 경향이 나타났다. 셋째, 통일에 대한 긍정적 태도에도 불구하고 통일세를 부담하겠다는 적극적 태도까지 이어지지는 못했다. 넷째, 페미니스트 의식 수준이 높을수록 북한이 적화통일의 의도를 가지고 있다고 보며, 경제제재 강화를 통한 북핵 문제 해결을 선호하는 것으로 나타났다. 이들은 평화 지향적인 태도를 지니기에 남북 간 대화와 타협이 진행되는 것에는 긍정적으로 평가하지만, 인권 유린국이자 가부장적 체계를 지닌 북한에는 거부감을 지녔음을 보여준다. 결국, 이들은 반통일 세력은 아니지만, 통일로 인한 부담은 회피하고자 하는 소극적 통일 찬성 세력이라는 점에서 북한에서 여성 인권 침해나 반평화적 행위가 두드러지면, 협력적 대북정책에 반대 견해로 쉽게 돌아설 수 있음을 예상할 수 있다.

An Empirical Analysis of the Women and Peace Hypothesis

For decades, social scientists have questioned whether women are more politically tolerant, peaceful, and less likely to prefer war to solve international conflict compared to men. Empirical analyses have been limited to a few geographic regions: North America (the United States); the Middle East (Israel and the core Arab World); and Africa (Rwanda). Furthermore, the measurement of the dependent variable, perceptions of war and peace, has been either evaluated with a single item or with a few items tapping on various dimensions of war and peace. This paper extends the geographic coverage in the literature to include a cross-national analysis containing North American, Latin American, Western European, Eastern European, African, Asian and Pacific nations, and utilizes thirteen items measuring gender differences in attitudes towards the perception of war, conflict resolution, foreign policy attitudes, international organizations’ appeal, political tolerance, and international cooperation. The analysis utilizes the most up-to-date data of national representative surveys, the World Values Survey and the Arab Barometer, featuring mean comparison methods to supply readers with simple results informing the relationship between gender and perceptions of war and peace on a global level. The evidence reveals that there is no difference in perceptions between men and women regarding international conflict perceptions across countries.

Traversing the Romance of a Liberal International Order: The Democratic Peace Thesis and the Regional Security Problematique in South Asia

The democratic peace hypothesis, which is embedded in the neo-Kantian romance of liberal cosmopolitan idealism, was framed in the spatiotemporal context of the Cold War bipolarity. Michael Doyle, who is one of its proponents, invoked the Kantian philosophical abstraction of ‘the perpetual peace’ by providing an intellectual defence and moral high ground for the values of the Liberal Capitalist world. In the post–Cold War setting, Francis Fukuyama re-casted the hypothesis and portrayed the triumph of liberal international order as ‘the end of history’. He attempted to reframe the democratic peace thesis, not only to celebrate liberal values as the normative exemplar for ordering a post–Cold War international system but also to provide an intellectual defence for the newly emerging space for American leadership in a post-hegemonic international system. This intellectual defence of the ethical supremacy of liberal idealism in the world, shaped by the leadership of the USA, was entrenched in the epistemological Imperialism of the West. Besides, it also reflected an exclusionary idea of the history of international relations that was heavily grounded in the chronology of the post-Westphalia international order. Situating ourselves in this framework, this article is an attempt to critique the epistemic foundations of the democratic peace hypothesis, by deconstructing its assertions in the geostrategic context of the regional security architecture in South Asia. The article criticizes the democratic peace thesis, using an analysis of the Kargil conflict (1999) between India and Pakistan, and by placing ourselves in the epistemological framework of the historical turn in international relations.

Do Mothers Stop War?: Multivariate Linear Regression Analysis On The Maternal Peace Hypothesis

The gender gap in the attitudes toward the use of violence is one of the heavily scrutinized research topics in political science. The claim that women are more peace loving and politically liberal than men is known as the women and peace hypothesis in the study of international relations. One of the most cited theoretical roots of the women and peace hypothesis is the ‘maternal thinking’ argument. According to the ‘maternal thinking’ argument, women’s politically liberal and peace loving attitude is the political representation of women’s child caring experience. In this paper, using multivariate linear regression analyses on the 109th U.S. Congress voting records, I test ‘maternal thinking’ argument and propose an alternative explanation on women's liberal political attitude. I argue that the biological difference between men and women is not a sufficient explanatory variable in explaining women’s political attitude. In fact, it is individual’s political ideology that influences one’s political attitude.

A game-theoretic analysis of international trade and political conflict over external territories

For analyzing conflict between two large open countries over external territories rich in natural resources, we develop a game-theoretic model of trade under resource appropriation possibilities. We show that greater trade openness (by lowering trade costs) reduces the overall intensity of arming when the adversary countries are symmetric in all dimensions. This finding is consistent with the liberal peace hypothesis that trade reduces conflict. We further analyze how equilibrium is affected by differences in national resource endowments. The resulting asymmetric equilibrium reveals that arming by the more endowed country exceeds that of the less endowed country and the two adversaries respond to lower trade costs differently: the more endowed country cuts back on its arming, whereas the less endowed country may increase it. Under resource endowment asymmetry, the aggregate arming allocations of the adversaries could increase despite greater trade openness.

Exploring the Microfoundations of the Gender Equality Peace Hypothesis

Exploring the Microfoundations of the Gender Equality Peace Hypothesis

국제정치학에서 여성 평화가설의 발전과 한계에 대한 탐색적고찰

국제정치학에서 여성 평화가설의 발전과 한계에 대한 탐색적고찰

Who needs the Women and Peace Hypothesis? Rethinking modes of inquiry on gender and conflict in Israel/Palestine

ABSTRACTThis article considers the evolution of scholarship on the Women and Peace Hypothesis (WPH) in light of evidence obtained from longitudinal research and multilevel analysis of women’s different engagements with the question of peace as citizens/civilians, peace activists and peace negotiators in Israel/Palestine. Evidence from this case suggests that: (1) feminist scholars no longer adhere to a one-dimensional prescription of the WPH but are more interested in developing intersectional methods to understand how nonlinear logics of conflict produce and sustain uncoherent gender stereotypes, roles and possibilities of action for women and men; (2) at all levels of analysis (individual, civil society, national) contextual factors, including patterns of political violence, collective identity, class and unequal gender regimes, affect women’s political engagement with peace much more than any other factor. Political context and the double gender regime in Israel/Palestine determine specific forms of insecurity experienced by women and are linked to political institutions, social norms and cultural frames that inform choice of action and opportunity for change; and (3) although empirical testing of this hypothesis repeatedly fails to confirm that women are more peaceful than men, the WPH remains a strong conceptual frame that enables women’s groups to politically mobilize for change.

Electoral democracy and civil war

The democratic civil peace hypothesis has generated considerable debate in conflict research. This debate has centered on three general claims: democracies have lower risk of civil conflict; autocracies have as low a risk of civil conflict as democracies; and hybrid regimes have the highest risk of civil conflict. This study reassesses the relationship between regime type and civil conflict by employing the newly constructed Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED). This measure enables us both to distinguish between levels of electoral democracy and distinct regime types. In contrasts to previous studies, our global statistical analysis shows that hybrid regimes do not have the highest risk of civil conflict. Rather, full autocracies are the most conflict prone, while full electoral democracies are least likely to experience civil conflict.

Civil Society at the Negotiation Table, Legitimacy Beliefs and Durable Peace

It is argued that including civil society at the negotiation table can increase the perceived legitimacy of peace treaties. As a result, it can contribute to the consolidation of peace. In this paper, the author presents the findings from a controlled experiment in order to test the impact of inclusive peace negotiations on the perceived legitimacy of peace treaties. Contrary to the expectations of the scholars working on the inclusiveness and the consolidation of peace hypothesis, the results show that the treatment group in the experiment does not perceive inclusive peace agreements to be more legitimate.

Civil Society at the Negotiation Table, Legitimacy Beliefs and Durable Peace

It is argued that including civil society at the negotiation table can increase the perceived legitimacy of peace treaties. As a result, it can contribute to the consolidation of peace. In this paper, the author presents the findings from a controlled experiment in order to test the impact of inclusive peace negotiations on the perceived legitimacy of peace treaties. Contrary to the expectations of the scholars working on the inclusiveness and the consolidation of peace hypothesis, the results show that the treatment group in the experiment does not perceive inclusive peace agreements to be more legitimate.

The Women and Peace Hypothesis in Peacebuilding Settings: Attitudes of Women in the Wake of the Rwandan Genocide

At the microlevel, the “women and peace” hypothesis suggests that women hold more pacific or compromising attitudes than men. Previous empirical studies of this hypothesis have focused on war-waging settings; this article is the first to bring the women and peace hypothesis to the peacebuilding phase. When studying the hypothesis after war, this article argues that the postconflict context, and especially war-related trauma, must be taken into account. Given that war affects women and men differently, there may be important gender differences in attitudes related to peacebuilding. To test this argument, data from a multistage, stratified cluster random survey of 1,200 Rwandans was analyzed, focusing on the connection between war-related psychological ill health and attitudes toward three issues of relevance for peacebuilding: trust, coexistence, and the gacaca (the Rwandan peacebuilding process). The results demonstrate that women reported significantly more negative attitudes than men toward all three issues. The article also suggests that this surprising finding may result from the different types and levels of trauma women and men experience in war: more men are killed, and more women are subjected to sexual violence. As more women are left to survive the atrocities of war, they may carry a heavier burden of war-related memories in their bodies and minds, leading to greater challenges in the peacebuilding and, often, truth-telling phase. In addition, higher levels of abuse against women in the postconflict phase may require continuing vigilance and anxiety. The article concludes by sketching out areas for future research investigating the important yet counterintuitive findings presented here.

Sawing Off the Branch on Which We Sit? Critical Realism, Open Systems, and Possible Futures

The Political Economy of Global Security: War, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance. By Patomaki Heikki. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 292 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-415-41672-6). The Political Economy of Global Security is an ambitious and unusual book. It seeks to contribute to peace and security studies by constructing narratives of possible global futures whose main purpose is to promote global peace and democracy. In developing its narratives, the book combines social theory in the form of critical realism (Bhaskar 1986) with the insights of empirico-analytical models, among them classical theories of imperialism and lateral pressure theory. From critical realism, Patomaki borrows a number of ideas, perhaps primary among them that social systems are open systems. Because they are open, social systems are “susceptible to external influences and internal, qualitative change and emergence” (Patomaki and Wight 1999:232). The most important implication is that constant conjunctions (or universal invariances) do not exist in open systems. For instance, the proposition that liberal democracies do not fight each other is a constant conjunction. (p. 20) Although constant conjunctions do not exist, we can gain knowledge of “contrastive demi-regularities,” defined as “a partial event regularity which prima facie indicates the occasional actualisation of geo-historical causal forces or mechanisms over a definite region of time-space” (p. 22). An example of a demi-regularity would be the lower frequency of wars between liberal democratic countries than between democracies and other countries since the late nineteenth century (p. 22). We can identify demi-regularities such as the democratic peace hypothesis, but they are both spatially and temporally limited and too unstable to provide a basis for thinking about the conditions for a future peaceful global order. In other words, in the absence of constant conjunctions, prediction is “fundamentally problematic” (p. 24). This leaves us with a seeming paradox: Prediction is problematic, yet the goal of future studies is to identify possible global futures. If the scenarios of possible global futures are not predictions, then what …

Evaluating the Nuclear Peace Hypothesis

Do nuclear weapons reduce the probability of war? This article quantitatively evaluates the nuclear peace hypothesis. The results indicate that the impact of nuclear weapons is more complicated than is conventionally appreciated. Both proliferation optimists and pessimists find confirmation of some of their key claims. When a nuclear asymmetry exists between two states, there is a greater chance of militarized disputes and war. In contrast, when there is symmetry and both states possess nuclear weapons, then the odds of war precipitously drop. When combined, these findings provide support for the existence of the stability—instability paradox. Evidence suggests that while nuclear weapons promote strategic stability, they simultaneously allow for more risk-taking in lower intensity disputes.

The Women and Peace Hypothesis? The Effect of Opponent Negotiators' Gender on the Evaluation of Compromise Solutions in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

AbstractThe "women and peace" hypothesis refers to the tendency of women to hold more peaceful and compromising attitudes than men. We hypothesized that common gender stereotypes that portray women as less aggressive and as more cooperative and considerate than men will cause a gendered evaluation effect, in which: (1) a compromise proposal offered by female opponents in peace negotiations will be valued more favorably, as more beneficial to ones' own side and as less beneficial to the opponents' side, in comparison to the same proposal when offered by male opponents; (2) female opponent negotiators offering the compromise proposal will be perceived as significantly higher in warmth and trustworthiness and as significantly lower in assertiveness than male opponent negotiators offering the same proposal. These effects were researched in the context of the protracted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. An experimental study examined the effect of national identity (Israeli vs. Palestinian) and gender (female vs. male) of negotiators offering a compromise proposal – aimed at resolving the conflict – on Jewish-Israeli evaluations of the proposal. The findings were consistent with the hypothesized gendered evaluation effect.

The Democratic Peace is What States Make of It: A Constructivist Analysis of the US-Indian ‘Near-Miss’ in the 1971 South Asian Crisis

In 1971, the United States and India — the world’s two largest democracies — almost went to war in a ‘near-miss’ at odds with the hypothesis that democracies do not fight one another. In this article, I reformulate the democratic peace hypothesis by subsuming it under a broadened constructivist analysis, one that recognizes that institutional qualities do not ‘speak for themselves’ but rather that struggles over the meaning of democracy can engender conflict. I then argue that differences regarding the meaning of democracy shaped post-World War II US perceptions of the South Asian distribution of power, explaining shifts from periods of Democratic friendship to Republican enmity toward India, with the latter most clearly manifested in the 1971 crisis. I conclude by emphasizing the merit of a constructivist theory of democratic interactions in explaining cooperation and conflict.

Critical Periods and Regime Type: Integrating Power Cycle Theory with the Democratic Peace Hypothesis

The absence of war among leading states compels scholars such as John Mueller (1989) to speculate on the obsolescence of major power conflict. Robert Jervis (2002) outlines the challenge that a democratic major power security community presents to existing theories of war. Can any existing theory of war explain conflict in a major power system dominated by democracies? This article integrates the power cycle theory of war with the democratic peace hypothesis in order to show that, although critical periods consistently lead to major power war, democratic states are less affected by these periods than are their nondemocratic counterparts. Using Correlates of War, deterrence, Polity and national capability data from 1816–1995, empirical tests show that — for all major powers — the probability of conflict participation and initiation is higher during critical periods than remaining years. Importantly, however, this difference is statistically significant for nondemocracies, while it is not so for democracies. This paper argues that structural components of democratic government are largely responsible for any immunity that democracies enjoy with regard to the potential maladies associated with critical periods. Brock F. Tessman is a Lecturer at the University of Denver, Graduate School of International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in December, 2004, from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena

Change among the Gatekeepers: Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena