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Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations pp 199–226Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Imperial Peace or Imperial Method? Skeptical Inquiries into Ambiguous Evidence for the “Democratic Peace”

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Part of the book series: New Visions in Security ((NVS))

Abstract

Rather than comprehensively review the immense Democratic Peace (DP) literature, this chapter seeks to link the weaknesses of the theory’s dominant epistemological foundations to broader tendencies in social science research.1 It contends that a positivist correlation of static definitions of democracy, statehood, and war cannot explain transformations of these phenomena over time. Moreover, DP theory naturalizes a landscape of power relations and interests that deserve critical scrutiny. DP theory’s most familiar and putatively positivist formulation argues that objective measurements of interaction among the variables “democracy,” “state,” and “war” clearly confirm the proposition that “democratic states do not go to war with one another.” A fetish with numbers coupled with an uncritical acceptance of the “commonsense” meaning of these variables, however, can obscure the extent to which each variable has transformed the others in modern history. This seemingly positivist formulation then becomes tautological, weakening comparison from one period to another. The DP debate in particular is representative of research that is naive of U.S. power relations and is thus potentially complicit with apologists of American abuses of power, a theme discussed in greater detail in the chapter’s conclusion.

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Authors
  1. Andrew Lawrence
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

    Richard Ned Lebow (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government) (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government)

  2. University of Maryland, USA

    Mark Irving Lichbach (Professor and Chair of Government and Politics) (Professor and Chair of Government and Politics)

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© 2007 Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach

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Lawrence, A. (2007). Imperial Peace or Imperial Method? Skeptical Inquiries into Ambiguous Evidence for the “Democratic Peace”. In: Lebow, R.N., Lichbach, M.I. (eds) Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations. New Visions in Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607507_8

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