How far is it from Königsberg to Kandahar? Democratic peace and democratic violence in International Relations

Abstract

Abstract Over the last two decades, there has been a ‘democratic turn’ in peace and conflict research, that is, the peculiar impact of democratic politics on a wide range of security issues has attracted more and more attention. Many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kant's famous essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. In this article, we present a critical discussion of the ‘democratic distinctiveness programme’ that emerged from the Democratic Peace debate and soon spread to cover a wider range of foreign policy issues. The bulk of this research has to date been based on an overly optimistic reading of a ‘Kantian peace’. In particular, the manifold forms of violence that democracies have exerted, have been treated either as a challenge to the Democratic Peace proposition or as an undemocratic contaminant and pre-democratic relict. In contrast, we argue that forms of ‘democratic violence’ should no longer be kept at arm's length from the democratic distinctiveness programme but instead should be elevated to a main field of study. While we acknowledge the benefits of this expanding research programme, we also address a number of normative pitfalls implied in this scholarship such as lending legitimacy to highly questionable foreign policy practices by Western democracies. We conclude with suggestions for a more self-reflexive and ‘critical’ research agenda of a ‘democratically turned’ peace and conflict studies, inspired by the Frankfurt school tradition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.