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Offers an appraisal of the democratic peace theory from the perspective of both classical and structural realism. It argues that while democracy can ameliorate some of the causes of war cited by realists, it cannot entirely eliminate them, and that the validity of the democratic peace proposition seems to depend on democracies being prosperous, satisfied, and developed states.

The transfer of power to a legitimate and sustainable local authority, typically mediated through an election, is the central purpose of any transitional administration. Elections and other ‘exit strategies’ are discussed in this chapter. The preference for democratic forms of governance is sometimes linked to the ‘democratic peace’ thesis, which holds that authentic democracies do not fight each other, or that such conflicts are exceptional. First elections can, however, mark an extremely unstable period in the life of a country emerging from conflict — indeed, quantitative research has produced the embarrassing finding that autocracies in the process of democratization actually become more likely to go to war. In practice, a great deal more attention has been paid to the technical side of elections than to their political purpose and significance. Meaningful state‐building depends on a deeper engagement with local stakeholders before and after voting takes place.

This chapter examines democratization, “failed states,” and empire building after the East–West conflict. The debate over “democratic peace” focused on democratization and was being underpinned by the vision of peace developed by Immanuel Kant in 1795. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there had been no serious discussion of Kant's ideas on how to achieve peace. Power–political realism, liberalism, and modernization theory, which were based on assumptions quite different from those of Kant, were far more prominent. It was only in the early 1980s that this changed, with global political developments and new political circumstances playing a crucial role in the resumption of the debate on Kant's ideas. The immediate trigger for this debate, at least the academic variant, was the two-part essay by Michael Doyle from 1983 entitled “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” The chapter also considers the relationship between international relations and sociology.

This chapter examines the United States' liberal democratic internationalism during the period 1989–2008, with particular emphasis on the evolution of American democracy promotion from what Reinhold Niebuhr called its “fortunate vagueness” to a hard ideology. It begins with a discussion of the neo-Wilsonian ideology that appeared in the “long decade” of the 1990s—a way of thinking characterized by both voluntarism and a pseudoscientific certitude that was absent in liberalism of the earlier periods. In particular, it considers the emergence of a “hard liberal internationalist ideology” that was comparable to Marxism–Leninism. It also explores the rise of democratic globalism as progressive imperialism, focusing on democratic peace theory and democratic transition theory. The chapter argues that American democracy promotion had become a pretext for “just war,” as evidenced by the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

This chapter examines democratic constraint, democratic peace, and conflict initiation. It begins with a time-series, cross-sectional analysis of conflict initiation in all possible pairs of countries (that is, all dyads) from 1965 to 2006. This analysis reveals the interactive relationship between media access and political opposition. Across a variety of indicators of conflict, states with media and political institutions that facilitate the flow of information between leaders and the public are less prone to initiate military conflicts. These findings suggest not only an underlying mechanism that could fuel the democratic peace proposition, but also that not all democracies are likely to be equally peaceful. Aside from conflict initiation and the extent of opposition with political parties, press freedom is also measured.

This concluding chapter considers a convincing conception of enduring peace and the need to move beyond monothematic diagnoses of the contemporary world and of social change. It argues that none of the debates on peace-engendering structures and processes that have taken place since the 1980s in social theory have produced convincing results. The thesis of the “democratic peace” has proved essentially unviable, at least with respect to the so-called Kantians' initial claim of global validity for their statements. The discussion of “failed states” and “new wars” has focused largely on processes of state decline or marketization but has done little to place these processes within a broader theoretical framework. Finally, the arguments put forward by theorists of an American imperium, which entail antithetical positions, have failed to show that this attempt to spread American power throughout the world will in fact succeed and bring about peace.

Twenty years ago realists, emphasizing the influence of the international system and working in the humanistic tradition, dominated research on the causes of war. Today, liberal theories occupy center stage, and political scientists rely on statistical analyses of pairs of states through time. Epidemiological studies of over 12,000 dyads, 1885-2001, using a liberal-realist model of interstate conflict confirm the pacific benefits of democracy and economic interdependence. Development is also beneficial. Key elements of realism do receive statistical support; but democracy and trade are at least as influential as power, and they are more amenable to social engineering. Realism does not provide a path to world peace. The best hope is continued liberal reforms: the expansion and deepening of democracy and capitalism and the inclusion of more countries in the international economic system. Fortunately, globalization has advanced rapidly in recent decades, making for a generally optimistic prognosis.

Neorealists such as Stephen M. Walt argue that the Bush administration's war on terror did not promote democratic reforms in the Middle East but instead heightened anti-American sentiment in the region. They argue that the US should have adopted a policy that allowed the natural dynamics and structure of the international system to provide global security, thereby limiting the country's involvement in foreign affairs. What they failed to consider, however, is that ideologies, regime types, and the propensities of individual leaders to significantly affect how states behave as can be seen in the contrasting results of the appeasement policy used on Nazi Germany during the 1930s and the prudent and more far-sighted strategy used during the Cold War. Even as the situation in the Middle East remains unstable, the Bush Doctrine can hardly be considered a failure as its critics claim. American intervention not only led to free elections in Iraq but brought down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and thwarted Al-Qaeda's attempts to attack the US once again.

This chapter addresses the rise of neo-Wilsonianism. The problem with neo-Wilsonianism is that it replaced the relatively amorphous thinking of liberal internationalism with a much “harder” ideology, one that gave its adherents a moral commitment to a more militant foreign policy based on social-science reasoning that represented a new argument in American liberal internationalism. Democratic peace theory, democratic transition theory, and the responsibility to protect in combination were a strong mixture, one with murderous consequences for the people in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as well as for American pretensions to hegemony in world politics. Neither human rights nor democratic government abroad was served by these imperialist adventures, nor was the national security of the United States in any way enhanced.

This chapter explores existing scholarship on democracy in international relations, focusing primarily on the democratic peace research programme. The remainder of the chapter provides the theoretical and conceptual framework for the book. It identifies how conceptions of democracy have developed in relation to principles of sovereignty and legitimacy in international society. A conceptual history methodology is proposed, which is outlined by drawing on the work of Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck. The final part of the chapter uses Thucydides to draw out some key themes of the book.

This chapter explores the connections between war and modernity as well as developments in Anglo-American historical sociology and its emphasis on war. Within American sociology, the turn to “war” was directly connected with the debate on modernization theory. This paradigm had not only forecast that the “underdeveloped countries” would come to resemble the United States and Western Europe both structurally and culturally: that they would become Westernized. Outside of Britain and the United States, historical sociology never managed to play much of a role. As far as Germany and France (as well as other European countries) are concerned, sociologists there either never really took a historical approach (Germany) or adopted a historical perspective molded by the dominant figure of Michel Foucault. This was evident in the debate on the “democratic peace” that took off in the 1980s and early 1990s, a debate of great relevance to social theory.

Conflict arenas in the past possessed far fewer constraints on conflict escalation than characterize the present and, presumably, the future. Four types of constraints are focused upon: democratic peace, economic interdependence, international organizations, and nuclear deterrence. Our question is how, and to what extent, are these factors relevant to a situation involving a rising China and a declining United States. We find that their applicability varies. Given a persistently authoritarian China, joint democracy is not likely to be a major factor. Nuclear deterrence is based more on beliefs than empirical evidence. Economic interdependence provides a better fit but the nature of industrialized productivity and marketing tends to generate mixed effects – some constraining while others inducing conflict. Of the four, international organizations seem least likely to play much of a role in a United States-China face-off.

Whether foreign policy should be exempted from democratic politics has been discussed since the early days of modern democracy. While this debate has oscillated between executive-friendly and democracy-friendly positions, it has neglected the role of political parties as essential actors in democratic decision-making and in providing cues to the public more broadly. Institutionalist and ideational theories of the so-called Democratic Peace in particular have neglected political parties, even though they silently assume that foreign and security policy is a matter of party-political contestation. Therefore, the theoretical framework outlined in this chapter also draws on scholarship in Foreign Policy Analysis that examined the role of ‘government ideology’. It suggests two propositions to inform the empirical analyses, namely 1) that foreign affairs are systematically contested, rather than shielded from democratic politics; 2) that party-political contestation is structured along the left/right dimension.

This chapter examines the discourse of “democratic peace” that has characterized the post–Cold War era. Working within a modernist conception of the future, it focuses on narratives of the future that have circulated in post–Cold War US national security policy documents. The chapter argues that the conception of the “real world order,” which divides the world into zones of democratic peace and zones of turmoil and advocates a security strategy of extending the zone of democratic peace, has led to a “peacetime” policy of “semiwar.” Specifically, narratives of “peace” that divide the world into mutually exclusive zones serve to legitimate the structural violence that has been, and continues to be, endemic to the making and maintenance of the modern world.

This chapter analyzes the impact of the overarching by-product of the major foundations' efforts—the economic order based on capitalist globalization—in the post-Cold War era and beyond. Major foundations remain supportive of existing international organizations and new organizations more suited to global conditions, with the likes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The Ford Foundation awards monetary grants to the World Bank for funding a microfinancing consultative group—a project that eases the loaning process in mainstream commercial banks. Another is the support of the Rockefeller Foundation to IMF's global programs, without which the world would return to the economic crises of the 1930s. Although they focused on the global sources for solutions to domestic problems, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, dealt a temporary blow to the trend. Nonetheless, the chapter follows the foundation-led globalization as this eventually spurred the emergence of the democratic peace theory (DPT).

This chapter identifies several flaws in the arguments of Patrick Buchanan and others in favor of isolationism over the moral democratic realism espoused by the Bush Doctrine as the country's strategy in the fight against terror. Over the years, American foreign policy necessarily drifted away from its isolationist stance in international conflicts, particularly during its formative years in the early nineteenth century, toward one that had the US more actively involved in keeping the balance of power during World Wars I and II and during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Today's geopolitical environment dictates that the US embrace its role as the world's only remaining superpower, given the continuing unrest in the Middle East and notwithstanding China's emergence as an economic powerhouse.

At the center of nonviolence as the nexus of history lies a paradox: the reality of a nonviolent revolution and the impossibility of the nonviolent state. The Chapter starts with a brief argument on why we should read the system established at Utrecht (1713), and not Westphalia (1648), to be at the origins of the nation-state and the international order within which world peace is sought. In a close reading of the “Perpetual Peace” genre in the eighteenth-century works of Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant behind the enduring democratic peace theories, against the inherent violence of the state as expressed in the works of Robert Cover on the nature of judging, it shows the persistent relevance of the paradox, and seeks to solve it temporally and substantively.

False claims to scientific authority were used to advance the American and British war on terror. In popular rhetoric, President George W. Bush borrowed (and distorted) one of the most influential theses of political science, the claim that democracies do not fight with one another. Bush also named prominent political scientists, including Francis Fukuyama—who claimed history had reached its culmination in liberal democracies—to prominent advisory positions in government. In addition, other prominent social scientists, such as Samuel Huntington, provided alternative social scientific justifications for the war on terror and later nationalistic public policy that relied on creating permanent outsider identities for Muslims and Latinos. Scientism helped American and British citizens imagine that their use of military violence was fully rational and objectively justified as the war on terror turned into the rise of ultranationalism.

This chapter compares and contrasts the Obama Doctrine with various foreign policy traditions. The Obama Doctrine is in many ways unique, approximating most closely the foreign policy of President Carter during his first three years in office. The Obama Doctrine stands furthest from the foreign policies characteristic of Truman, Reagan, and George W. Bush. None of the traditional formulations of American foreign policy fully captures President Obama’s unique synthesis. Ironically, the Obama Doctrine is most closely aligned with the outlook of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who also advocates a substantial devolution of American power and discounts ideology and regime type as key variables for identifying friends and foes.