Democratic Peace Theory

The democratic peace theory has been widely discussed by scholars of international relations and whereas on the one hand it is acclaimed as the “closest thing we have to a law in international politics”, it is rejected as not being true by the other side. Whether the democratic peace theory is a useful guidance for policy-makers or not is the conflict of different theories in international relations, namely liberalism and realism. This paper wants to clarify the disparity of liberalism and realism in the aspect of the democratic peace theory and therefore it will start with the idealist perspective, followed by the view of the opponents of the theory and then ending with a conclusion on the merits of democratic peace theory.

In the regard of the democratic peace theory it is difficult to find any reliable and meaningful statistical date because this is a field of research that demands various definitions which vary from author to author. They set up different meanings for the terms 'democracy' and 'war' respectively 'conflict'. However, specific ideas of those terms are essential as this paper will point out. However, there have been examples of democracies fighting other democracies in wars, for instance the Kashmir conflicts between India and Pakistan, or in more modern history the 2006 Lebanon War and the five-day war between Georgia and Russia in 2008.