3 .1 Commercial peace

The commercial peace thesis has a long and well-known traditionFootnote ²⁰ but did not figure prominently until the 1990s when it gained momentum in the wake of the Democratic Peace debate. Although Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ mentioned the ‘spirit of commerce’ only in a supplement, the commercial peace thesis was quickly incorporated as one of three legs in a ‘Kantian triangle’. Most proponents of the commercial peace have drawn on expected utility-models and developed an ‘economic deterrence argument’Footnote ²¹ according to which the anticipation of a disruption in trade deters political leaders from escalating conflicts. From a constructivist perspective ‘economic exchange becomes a medium for communicating perspectives, interests, and desires on a broad range of matters not the subject of economic exchange, and […] these communications form an important channel for conflict management’.Footnote ²²

Although several studies found support for the thesis that economically significant trade between states reduces the risk of armed conflict between them, a large number of scholars reported lasting doubts since the findings remained vulnerable to changes in concepts, data measurement or time periods studied.Footnote ²³ As a consequence, scholars called for the identification of context conditions for the commercial peace.Footnote ²⁴

Among the context conditions suggested are the level of economic development, the institutionalisation of trade relations and – most significant in the context of this article – the regime type of the states engaged in trade. Christopher Gelpi and Joseph Grieco in particular have argued that democracies ‘react to greater trade integration with a reduced propensity to initiate militarised disputes with their partners’.Footnote ²⁵ Drawing on the standard economic argument about the effects of trade and on selectorate theory, Gelpi and Grieco argue that democratic institutions entail incentives for leaders to provide public goods including growth by fostering trade. Moreover, once a state has established high levels of trade with another country, democratic leaders can be expected to be vulnerable to possible interruptions of trade flows because missed growth opportunities may damage their prospects of being re-elected.

The commercial peace can also be expected to be particularly strong among democracies because democracies tend to trade disproportionately among themselves. Harry Bliss and Bruce Russett listed several reasons for especially high levels of trade among democracies: First of all, leaders in democracies ‘need be less concerned that a democratic trading partner will use gains from trade to endanger their security than when their country trades with a nondemocracy’; furthermore, companies will ‘prefer to trade with those in states with whom relations are reliably peaceful’ and where the rule of law precludes expropriations. Finally, shared norms ‘help reduce trade interference from embargoes and boycotts.’Footnote ²⁶ Further empirical studies found that democracies indeed have a higher probability to conclude preferential trade agreements.

Taken together, the incorporation of the commercial peace into a ‘Kantian peace programme’ has given a new impetus to the debate about economic interdependence and peace. Moreover, inconclusive empirical results have led to a search for context conditions which in turn has brought commercial peace research closer to the democratic distinctiveness programme. It is interesting to note that the revitalised commercial peace debate has, at least so far, hardly been taken up by policy circles. Although peace may seem an attractive selling point for further trade liberalisation in a public climate of widespread scepticism, economic considerations have clearly dominated public discourse. In contrast to the institutional peace debate (see next section), the democratic turn in commercial peace studies has also no discernible legitimating function for current policies, even though it could be used to justify a turn from global to regional, inter-democratic trade regimes. Notwithstanding the merits of commercial peace research, its misleading equalisation with Kant's third definitive article has discouraged a more comprehensive exploration of Kant's cosmopolitan law in peace and conflict studies.Footnote ²⁷

3 .2 Institutional peace

While there have always been countless studies on the contribution of a particular international institution to the management of a particular conflict, early large-n studies could not find any significant effect of membership in international institutions on the level of conflict between states.Footnote ²⁸ This corresponded to a reading of Kant according to which his ‘federation of free states’ is rather a result of than a cause for peace.Footnote ²⁹ However, in the aftermath of the Democratic Peace debate a new wave of studies on the ‘institutional peace’ emerged.

Again, a broad range of causal mechanisms has been put forward to explain the pacifying effect of international institutions: they may reduce uncertainty by conveying information, they may act as mediators in a conflict or, as in collective security institutions, even coerce norm-breakers.Footnote ³⁰ From a constructivist perspective, institutions may contribute to peace by creating trust, by generating narratives of mutual identification and by socialising states into norms of peaceful conflict resolution.Footnote ³¹

In spite of a much later take-off than the commercial peace-debate, the courses of the two debates have shown striking similarities: Whereas several studies found evidence in support of an institutional peace, others failed to do so suggesting that the institutional peace thesis is vulnerable to changes in specification and measurement. The subsequent search for context conditions again led to a ‘democratic turn’, that is, the regime type of the member states was identified as an important qualification of the institutional peace thesis.

Democracies have been considered to have both particular inclinations and capacities to establish and maintain international institutions.Footnote ³² To a large extent, explanations for these particular features of democracies' foreign policies have drawn on causal mechanisms familiar from explanations for the Democratic Peace and the commercial peace. For example, the selectorate theory holds that democracies tend to establish and maintain international institutions for the same reasons that they tend to avoid costly wars or promote trade: because democratic leaders face incentives to provide public goods, they will establish and maintain international institutions which help to do so. From a constructivist point of view, in contrast, democracies tend to cooperate among themselves for the same reason they maintain peaceful relations and high levels of trade: a common set of values fosters trust and overcomes otherwise prominent relative gains concerns, etc.

Democracies are not only considered to be especially interested in international cooperation; they are also regarded to be particularly capable to establish and maintain international institutions. Again, the causal mechanisms that make democracies ‘reliable partners’Footnote ³³ are familiar from the Democratic Peace. Most importantly, the checks and balances, transparency and openness characteristic of decision-making in democracies also contribute to their capability to establish and maintain international institutions. Because entering into an international commitment requires the consent of parliaments, courts, interest groups, etc., defection becomes less likely once such consent has been achieved.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, free media and a vital civil society make the detection of defection likely which in turn helps to mitigate problems of monitoring characteristic of collective action problems. From a constructivist perspective, one may add that democracies' esteem for the rule of law extends to the honouring of international (legal) commitments.Footnote ³⁵

In another analogy to commercial peace-research, scholars of the institutional peace have argued that democracies cooperate disproportionately among themselves and that ‘interdemocratic institutions’ (that is, international institutions composed of democracies) are particularly effective in reaping the pacifying effects of cooperation.Footnote ³⁶ A number of empirical findings have supported the notion of a ‘democratic turn’ in the institutional peace-debate. Democracies have, on average, more memberships in intergovernmental organisations (IGOs)Footnote ³⁷ and are less likely to violate alliance commitments.Footnote ³⁸ Most importantly, in a study covering the period between 1885 and 2000, Jon Pevehouse and Bruce Russett have provided empirical evidence that IGOs have the more pacifying effects the more democratic their member states are.Footnote ³⁹

Notwithstanding mounting empirical evidence, we consider the democratic turn in the institutional peace problematic in two, interrelated respects. First, in a similar vein as John MacMillan had already in 1995 voiced a perceptive ‘Kantian protest’, here once again such a protest against an allegedly Kantian reading of interdemocratic institutions seems warranted. Doyle, Russett and many others understand Kant's ‘federation of free countries’ as a plea for inter-democratic cooperation as a nucleus of an expanding security community.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, there is considerable evidence drawn from Kant's comprehensive writings that he imagined his federation of ‘free’ states as comprising independent, sovereign states, but not necessarily exclusively liberal democratic states.Footnote ⁴¹

Since ‘Perpetual Peace’ is an obvious source of authority reaching out beyond the scholarly community, this dispute is related to the second problem of the democratic turn, namely the assignment of legitimacy to inter-democratic institutions such as NATO and the EU. Such a democratic turn has potentially dramatic consequences as it weakens security institutions with mixed membership such as the UN or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that were designed to foster peaceful cooperation among all member states, whether democracies or not. At the same time, institutions exclusively composed of democracies appear not only particularly capable but also legitimised to act on behalf of an otherwise ‘ineffective’ international community. Just as the Democratic Peace lent dubious legitimacy to interventionist security doctrines, the democratic turn in institutional peace analysis may attribute legitimacy to military interventions that, like the Kosovo campaign in 1999, lack a clear basis in international law but enjoy the support of Western democracies and of the international institutions they have formed.

4 .1 Democracies' use of force: challenge to or flipside of democratic peace?

Proponents of the so-called monadic Democratic Peace theory who argue that democracies are more peaceful in general never claimed that democracies do not fight wars; they only claim that democracies fight wars less frequently than other regimes. With some notable exceptions such as Michael Doyle, John MacMillan, John Owen, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (with various co-authors), however, proponents of the Democratic Peace hardly analysed the violence emanating from (liberal) democratic states in terms of its (liberal) democratic distinctiveness. If ‘democratic violence’ surfaced at all, it was often presented as a challenge to the Democratic Peace proposition or traced back to democratic deficits of the polity or to pre-democratic ideological remnants in the political culture.

For example, in his study on US covert actions against elected governments during the Cold War period, David Forsythe argued that these actions at first glance seem inconsistent with the liberal analyses of inter-democratic relations. At closer look, however, covert actions appear to be possible only because ‘the decisions are not taken in the open, subject to the full range of checks and balances and popular participation’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Likewise, Ernst-Otto CzempielFootnote ⁴⁵ argued that wars by democracies such as the one fought by the US in Vietnam point to a lack of democratic control even in otherwise mature democracies. In a similar vein, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, who demonstrated the enhanced risks of nationalist violence and war-proneness of democratising regimes during their transition phase,Footnote ⁴⁶ do not question the democratic peace between mature, consolidated democracies. Notwithstanding vast differences in theoretical approaches and methods, these studies regard consolidated democracies as inherently peace-prone and attribute their aggression to pockets of un- or pre-democratic institutions and culture.

The use of force by democracies figured more prominently in the more wide-spread dyadic variants of Democratic Peace research. The statement ‘democracies rarely if ever fight one another but are as war-prone as other regime-types’ clearly captures the democratic ‘Janus face’, that is, their capabilities and inclination for acting as peaceful as well as militant forces in world politics.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, since the Democratic Peace research originated in the refutation of central Realist assumptions about international politics, the ‘positive’ puzzle of peaceful relations between consolidated democracies remained the primary focus of research for long.Footnote ⁴⁸

Academic and political attention for ‘democratic’ or ‘liberal’ wars then grew considerably in the light of an increased ‘liberal interventionism’ after the end of the Cold War.Footnote ⁴⁹ The so-called War on Terror, proclaimed by the US administration after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and joined by some other Western allies, further highlighted ‘the fact that certain liberal democracies are highly war-prone, and their “enemies” are represented as being existential threats to the Western way of life’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Partly backed by a revived UN Security Council, partly self-empowered, the West legitimated multi-party Western military actions as so-called humanitarian interventions or as international law enforcement missions. They were fought in the name of restoring peace, of punishing lawbreakers and eliminating the foes of humanity, and of protecting human rights and promoting democracy. Democratic interventionism could thus be read as the violent manifestation of a liberal world ordering and governance project, attempting – but often failing – to export Western forms of rule, statehood and democracy.Footnote ⁵¹

Against this backdrop, parts of recent research on the use of force by Western liberal democracies investigate into inherently democratic or liberal contexts that fostered these instances of violence. To be sure, such studies do not present fully comprehensive explanations of single wars and interventions, but they point out specific democratic or liberal ingredients of these military actions. Conceiving of a ‘democratic war’ as the flipside of a ‘democratic peace’ rests on the assumption that the very same features that are deemed responsible for peace among democracies contribute to their hostility towards non-democracies.Footnote ⁵² Examining such inherent ambivalences of liberal-democratic institutions, norms and values hence implies taking up a suggestion that Michael Doyle had made earlier on the nature of the ‘separate peace’ but that had found rather little systematic consideration at that time: ‘[…] the very constitutional restraint, international respect for individual rights and shared commercial interests that establish grounds for peace among Liberal states establish grounds for additional conflict irrespective of actual threats to national security in relations between Liberal and non-Liberal societies’.Footnote ⁵³

4 .2 The ambivalence of liberal norms

The phenomenon of liberal interventionism has (re)directed attention to the fact that liberal norms do not only promote peace, as classical Democratic Peace Theory maintains, but that they can also legitimise the use of force. This fundamental ambivalence of liberal norms appears in various conditions, as this section will outline. Although liberal justifications have certainly been employed before,Footnote ⁵⁴ it was the end of the Cold War and the anticipation of an impending liberal world order that paved the way for an enhanced significance of liberal justifications for using force.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similar to social-constructivist strands of Democratic Peace, which focus on the (peace promoting) role of norms, the construction of collective identities, the beneficial effects of learning processes and the creation of trust between democracies,Footnote ⁵⁶ a social-constructivist variant has emerged that investigates the flipside of normative liberalism, of liberal identity formation and the mistrust against non-democratic regimes.

In a social-constructivist perspective norms structure political decisions, they enable and restrain appropriate policy options available in a given society. In this vein, it highly matters which public justifications political decision-makers use in order to legitimise their decision to engage in a military intervention, and which justifications are accepted by their democratic public as legitimate. ‘Norms are causal insofar as they regulate behaviour. Reasons are causes to the extent that they provide motivation and energy for action.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The normative structure of a society is embodied in its political culture, underpinned by the legal framework of the polity. In order to establish which norms have constitutive or regulative effects on behaviour, a combination of methods is required, for example discourse analysis, process tracing and counterfactuals.Footnote ⁵⁸

With regard to democracies' use of force, this leads social-constructivist scholars to analyse the liberal (or non-liberal) norms that are referred to in decision-making bodies as well as the general public. While this certainly does not account for all the factors that motivate a warring democracy's behaviour, this focus can illuminate an important enabling (or restraining) structure which circumscribes the range of political decisions of democratic actors. In addition, such analyses can trace how democratic actors deliberately attempt to change the normative structure by modifying or challenging dominant interpretations of norms, or by violating norms. The norms under investigation in decisions on war and peace include domestic and international legal norms, norms constituting a national identity or a collective identity beyond the state, and norms emerging from ‘lessons learnt’ from one's own history or from joint state practices.

Works in political theory and philosophy on the nature of liberal norms have in general debated what has been found recently confirmed in empirical studies on democracies' use of force: the norms which constitute the political culture of liberal-democratic polities are fundamentally ambivalent and contested.Footnote ⁵⁹ The normative underpinning of Western military actions has thus lent new impulses to a much older debate on the varieties of liberalism, that is, on strands of liberal thought which can be divided into more self-restrained and more interventionist approaches to international politics.Footnote ⁶⁰ This debate takes issue with the civilising effects of liberal norms and values which the Democratic Peace research postulates, and sets forth the contradictions and tensions between several norms, which can foster the use of force.Footnote ⁶¹

Liberal democratic institutions and political cultures build on assets of different strands of liberal thought, as has often been demonstrated at the example of the US political culture, which contains normative structures that foster interventionist, missionary driving forces as well as a self-restrained, ‘isolationist’ approach to the outside world, restricting itself to regard the own country as a shining example but not attempting to convert others.Footnote ⁶² This pluralisation of political culture is no distinct feature of the US as several Western political cultures exhibit pluralist normative structures rooted in different traditions of liberal thought and in differing conclusions about ‘lessons learnt’ from the past. Since cultures provide and circumscribe the universe of acceptable justifications for the use of force in a society, much depends on the interpretations of the ruling political coalitions. As empirical studies on past and on contemporary interventions have shown, left-liberal, liberal, conservative or socialist parties can cite quite different ‘legacies’ of the own culture; they do refer to quite different norms rendering the use of force appropriate or inappropriate for their own country.Footnote ⁶³ Hence it is crucial for the conception of a democratic war as a flipside of democratic peace to scrutinise the ambivalent norms of a political culture and the (controversial) references to these norms by elites in order to establish whether the cultural structuration follows predominantly ‘pacifist’ or ‘militant’ lines.Footnote ⁶⁴

Politico-cultural norms can also be read in terms of dominant self-images and images of an ‘other’ in a liberal society, the fiction of a ‘nation's’ unity and a distinct identity has to be permanently constructed and reproduced. This basic idea of social-constructivist research on the making of collective identities had been transferred to Democratic Peace by Thomas Risse-Kappen in a seminal article in 1995.Footnote ⁶⁵ As critical studies on collective identity formation show,Footnote ⁶⁶ the flipside of the construction of identities is the demarcation of an ‘other’, who in extreme cases can be perceived as an abhorrent foe. With regard to the war-proneness of a democracy, enquiring into such constructions of self and other can establish whether there are resonant enemy images apt to mobilise citizens in favour of a war and to enhance the perceived legitimacy of a military action. Social-constructivist case studies on a democratic war can at that junction connect with analyses of ‘othering’ and identity politics abound in critical security studies.Footnote ⁶⁷

Liberal thought has dealt with its ‘others’ from the very beginning; a recent rediscovery of Kant's figure of the ‘unjust enemy’ exposes these seeds of illiberalism and of self-empowerment to interventionism contained within liberalism itself.Footnote ⁶⁸ For such interpretations of Kant the logical distance from Königsberg to Kandahar is not too far since democratic peace between civilised lawful regimes and democratic war against evil terrorists in Afghanistan root in the same liberal thinking. To be sure, Kant's hostis iniustus as foe of humankind is one extreme representation of a liberal's ‘other’, but the tendency to denigrate non-liberal ‘others’ has been a notorious trait of liberal imperialism throughout history. In the past as well as in the present, liberalism has often been criticised for an inherent imperialism,Footnote ⁶⁹ which manifests itself not only in a sense of superiority towards other cultures and regimes but also in the violent ‘civilianisation’ of others in the name of democracy, freedom and progress. The recent Iraq war, which the US and Great Britain have also justified with the aim of regime change, underlines that such liberal ordering claims are no remains of the past. From this particular liberal perspective, ‘rogue states’ impede the progress of civilianisation, they pose a threat to other state's physical and normative security and must be forced to change their regime.Footnote ⁷⁰

In conclusion, understanding what liberal states are not only fighting for but also against is an important tenet of social-constructivist research on democratic peace and war. Liberal norms can serve both to stabilise a peaceful community of fellow liberals and to identify potential targets of liberal militancy. But as data on pre-war discourses in Western democracies since 1990 have shown, there is no ‘pure’ liberal war, but always a democracy-specific mixture of normative liberalism and more traditional national interests in public justifications.Footnote ⁷¹ Lawrence Freedman conceives of a ‘liberal war’ as a war ‘conducted in pursuit of a humanitarian agenda. […] The ideal type for a liberal war is that it is altruistic in inspiration and execution. […] It is liberating and empowering while involving as few casualties as possible.’Footnote ⁷² In a similar vein, John Vasquez defines liberal wars as ‘wars that are based on moral claims to do what is right rather than claims about the national interest. These wars include wars for democracy or humanitarian wars arising out of armed humanitarian interventions’. Vasquez regards the Kosovo war ‘the quintessential liberal war of our time’Footnote ⁷³ But also with regard to the Kosovo war, which represents the last prominent ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the 1990s phase of a moralising liberal interventionism, we find clear references to self-interested motives in the intervening NATO states, such as preventing a further regional destabilisation or the further influx of refugees from the Balkans.Footnote ⁷⁴

4 .3 A democratic way of war?

The extension of the democratic distinctiveness programme into the realm of democracies and war did not stop at investigating distinctly liberal justifications for the use of armed force. Rather, the peculiarities of democracies at war became a further object of extensive study and debate. Research in this domain could build on established bodies of literature that had been written without any interest in possible differences between democracies and autocracies. This is particularly evident with regard to the issue of military victory.

This classical topic of military academies has been brought into the remit of the democratic distinctiveness programme by Dan Reiter and Allan Stam in particular. In contrast to Realist orthodoxy, Reiter and Stam do not trace military effectiveness back to the usual ‘hard’ factors such as economic power or number of troops and material, nor to the joint fighting power of alliances, but to two distinct democratic mechanisms, ‘the skeleton and spirit of democracy’.Footnote ⁷⁵ They maintain that a ‘selection effect’ has helped democracies to win more than three-quarters of their wars since 1815: Since democratic leaders are dependent upon the majority consent of their citizens and since political decisions are deliberated in the public, governments will only decide to wage a war if the prospects to win are well established. Furthermore, Reiter and Stam ascribe superior abilities, training and motivation to soldiers in democracies the roots of which lie in a special liberal-democratic political culture which puts a premium upon individual initiative and performance. This cultural appreciation for the individual and his/her capacities ensures the selection of a competent and able military leadership and motivates the individual soldiers to effective fighting.

Reiter's and Stam's book triggered a debate on the solidity of the data and the plausibility of the explanations of such a ‘democratic triumphalism’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although the main thesis has thus remained controversial, it is again democratic distinctiveness that has been placed at the centre of a debate that used to be a home ground for military historians and scholars highly sceptical of the public's interference into military politics. ‘Democracies at War’ also casts a dark shadow on normative explanations of the Democratic Peace. Reiter and Stam demonstrate in empirical cases that majorities of citizens have opted in favour of war – even in the absence of imminent danger – and governments followed them in that. However, public support typically lasted only a short time and quickly dropped once casualties mount.Footnote ⁷⁷

Research on the effect of casualties on government popularity and policy goes back to John Mueller's studies on the wars in Korea and Vietnam.Footnote ⁷⁸ Democratic Peace scholarship elevated casualty aversion to a central building bloc in its argument that accountability makes governments unlikely to engage in risky military missions. If citizens are reluctant to consent to wars, shying away from its material and humanitarian costs, then governments, interested in their re-election, can be expected to avoid putting their troops at risk. As with military effectiveness and victories, the alleged democratic distinctiveness in avoiding casualties has remained subject to caveats, qualifications and controversy. On the one hand, Stephen Watts and Martin Shaw have discussed to what extent democracies' casualty aversion even extends to troops and civilians of the opponent. Whereas Watts presents empirical evidence that democratic publics follow a clear norm hierarchy of casualties with own civilians and soldiers on top of the opponent's ones, Shaw focuses on the legitimacy problems arising from prioritising the protection of own forces over local civilians in recent wars fought by democracies.Footnote ⁷⁹ Remarkably, even scholars who find democracies not to differ from authoritarian states in deliberately targeting civilians, still make a considerable effort to highlight differences in motivation.Footnote ⁸⁰ On the other hand, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver and Jason Reifler argued that the public's sensitivity to casualties has been overestimated. Instead, they argue that democratic publics are prepared to accept losses if they are confident about the success of the military operation.Footnote ⁸¹ In the context of this article, the empirical accuracy of such claims is of far less importance than the fact that research on casualties, public opinion and government policy has become an integral part of the democratic distinctiveness programme.

Because the procurement of technologically advanced weapons systems can increase the protection of armed forces and minimise casualties, research on armament and defence spending was another natural candidate for a ‘democratic turn’. Enhancing military effectiveness can delude the public into thinking that ‘bloodless’ wars and swift victories are possible and that expected benefits will outbalance the costs.Footnote ⁸² The latest ‘revolution in military affairs’, which has been propelled by the US in particular and which utilises the advancements in information and computer technologies for the armed forces, has been debated in this context. Extensive reconnaissance, an improved integration of different weapons systems and a higher speed and precision of weapons are the main characteristics of this contemporary ‘revolution’ in arms technology; the reduction of costs and risks is its central motive.Footnote ⁸³

The issue of a distinctly restrained warfare by democracies has gained new salience since the 1990s when liberal states increasingly claimed to fight for humanitarian purposes.Footnote ⁸⁴ The task of Western interventionist forces to protect the local civilians from violations of human rights and to establish democracy and the rule of law implies high moral obligations which the interveners have to fulfil. Otherwise they will lose credibility and will be regarded as imperial occupational powers. Since Western democracies have increasingly linked their use of force to ‘benign’ purposes (see section 4.2) and established liberal protectorates, they have to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population on the ground.Footnote ⁸⁵ Taking humanitarian claims seriously would therefore require the West to deploy much more ground troops and to put their own troops in harm's way instead of jeopardising the civilians they seek to protect.Footnote ⁸⁶ In other words: transferring the risk from one's own troops to civilian populations repudiates the humanitarian purposes of the mission. At that junction, normative justifications for ‘liberal wars’ clash with the cost-benefit calculations of rational democratic publics and leaders.

In conclusion, the recent surge of research on democratic violence is a welcome amendment to the Democratic Peace literature as it highlights the more troubling sides of democratic politics for international security that are closely intertwined with the bright sides of inter-democratic peace and cooperation. Although specific findings remain contested and subject to further study and refinement, the extension of the democratic distinctiveness programme to various aspects of democratic violence promises to sketch a much more comprehensive and accurate picture of democratic politics' impact on international security.