Democratic peace theory

Democratic peace theory is a theory which posits that democracies are hesitant to engage in armed conflict with other identified democracies. In contrast to theories explaining war engagement, it is a "theory of peace" outlining motives that dissuade state-sponsored violence.

Some theorists prefer terms such as "mutual democratic pacifism" or "inter-democracy nonaggression hypothesis" so as to clarify that a state of peace is not singular to democracies, but rather that it is easily sustained between democratic nations.

Among proponents of the democratic peace theory, several factors are held as motivating peace between democratic states:

Those who dispute this theory often do so on grounds that it conflates correlation with causation, and that the academic definitions of 'democracy' and 'war' can be manipulated so as to manufacture an artificial trend.

Though the democratic peace theory was not rigorously or scientifically studied until the 1960s, the basic principles of the concept had been argued as early as the 1700s in the works of philosopher Immanuel Kant and political theorist Thomas Paine. Kant foreshadowed the theory in his essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch written in 1795, although he thought that a world with only constitutional republics was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace. Kant's theory was that a majority of the people would never vote to go to war, unless in self-defense. Therefore, if all nations were republics, it would end war, because there would be no aggressors. In earlier but less cited works, Thomas Paine made similar or stronger claims about the peaceful nature of republics. Paine wrote in "Common Sense" in 1776: "The Republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace." Paine argued that kings would go to war out of pride in situations where republics would not. French historian and social scientist also argued, in Democracy in America (1835–1840), that democratic nations were less likely to wage war.

Dean Babst, a criminologist, was the first to do statistical research on this topic. His academic paper supporting the theory was published in 1964 in Wisconsin Sociologist; he published a slightly more popularized version, in 1972, in the trade journal Industrial Research. Both versions initially received little attention.

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