Making liberal use of Kant? Democratic peace theory and Perpetual Peace

Kant's Perpetual Peace and World Government

The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory

Democratic peace theory is probably the most powerful liberal contribution to the debate on the causes of war and peace. In this paper I examine the causal logics that underpin the theory to determine whether they offer compelling explanations for the finding of mutual democratic pacifism. I find that they do not. Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resoluti...

The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and Evidence

Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange within a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the ...

Thucydides and Democratic Peace

Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides rem...

Uncertainty of the Liberal Peace

In social science there often exists several plausible theories to explain actions, and hence several models which researchers can use in their empirical work. Researchers Barbieri (1996, 1998) and Oneal and Russett (1999) using different measures of trade interdependence (models) have come to disparate conclusions with respect to trade's effect on conflict. Each of their inferences is based on...