The concept of "democratic peace"

Résumé du document

Democratic regime is perceived as the best way to ensure peace in the world. Several political scientists have theorized this subject, and the result is the Theory of Democratic peace. Nevertheless, this theory had to face several criticisms. This fact incited our attention towards this topic and made us question about the nature of democracy, the democracies in the world and the real impact of democracies on the peace in the world. Furthermore, the phenomenon of the rise of illiberal democracies can contest the Theory of Democratic peace even more strongly. This is one reason why we decided to look on the reality of democratic peace in detail. At the beginning, we were not certain about the choice of our theme, because the large field of political sciences offers an important number of interesting topics. First of all, we wanted to choose a subject that would be dynamic and will reveal some discussions and eventually controversies. It would affect countries in general; not only specific ones and we believe that our topic confirms all these conditions. It is, indeed, a very real problem and many authors perpetually deal with it.

Extraits

[...] The effectiveness of democracy reposes as well on the civil peace. If the state has a high level of education and is socially developed, the democracy is effective. On the contrary, if there is just some group of rich persons who have access to the education in the regime, there is always only this privileged group who access the power. This regime is not a democracy, but the oligarchy. The oligarchic regime brings instability and does not cause the peace. [...]

[...] International Studies Quarterly 50 313–338. doi: 10.1111 /j.1468- 2478.2006 .00404.x Hegre, Håvard (2003). "Disentangling Democracy and Development as Determinants of Armed Conflict (required)". Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. Spiro, David E. (1994). "Give Democratic Peace a Chance? The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace". International Security U W (Vol No (Autumn, 1994)): 50–86. doi: 10.2307 /2539196 Russett, Bruce (October 1995). [...]

[...] The opinions on this theory differ with positions of authors. As result, the studies often present contradictory or at least quite different opinions. The principal contrasts are based on the definition of the democracy and war. ı Scheme found on www. Rand.org Problem of definitions and interpretation of events The essential problem concerns the definition of democracy. Some authors criticize the existence of a unique definition of democracy and affirm that there is a reinterpretation of state's regimes types, motivated by own interests of other countries. [...]

[...] Rand.org This scheme shows how institutions in democratic countries can ensure peace by two means. We are used to affirm that constitutional and legal checks on the actions of executives and the free public debate permits to maintain peace in different ways. First of all, they give democracies enough time to control the conflicts in a peaceful way, and in addition, democratic countries do not expect that other ones could start a surprise attack. Even more, the existence of democratic institutions supposes limited prerogatives of leaders who consequently can't start wars against democratic countries independently. [...]

[...] The problem is that the democracy itself has some limits. Consequently, we can discover that the peace between so called democracies can be limited as well. Moreover, some authors suppose that it is not only the democracy that influences the engagement of states into the war. In our study we wanted to bring arguments for and against this theory, and finally discover whether the theory of Democratic peace is a pure theoretic fiction, or it has real bases in the world's reality. [...]