Bordering on Peace: Democracy, Territorial Issues, and Conflict

Abstract

I argue that democracy and peace are both symptoms-not causes-of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors, and in this sense the ''empirical law'' of democratic peace may in fact be spurious. As democracies tend to stabilize their border relations prior to becoming democratic, democracy as an independent variable in conflict studies captures the effects of an absence of territorial issues. States without these issues are less prone to disputes prior to regime type, and I show that, after controlling for the presence of stable borders, joint democracy exercises no pacifying effect on conflict behavior from 1946 to 1999.Most democratic peace scholarship takes regime type as given and then estimates its effect on the likelihood of conflict. This paper deviates from that formula by endogenizing regime type to test whether joint democracy is actually an instrumental variable that represents an absence of territorial issues in particular dyads, especially neighbors. If states are most likely to have issues with their neighbors, but some neighbors remove these issues from contention, peaceful relationships should exist among these states outside of regime type. I argue that democracy and peace might both be symptoms-not causes-of the removal of territorial issues between neighbors, and in this sense the ''empirical law'' of democratic peace might be spurious (Levy 1988).In the sections that follow, I examine literature on the steps to war explanation of conflict and the democratic peace, noting potentially useful points of accommodation between their findings. Next, I outline a theory that understands both peace and regime type-in particular, democracy-to be the product of specific patterns of border relationships. I then test this theory against a model of conflict that controls for the effects of border relationships and find that joint democracy does not exercise a pacifying effect on dispute initiation. Territorial Issues and the Steps to WarContiguity enjoys wide empirical support as one of the key factors influencing the likelihood of war in dyads (

Democracy and armed conflict

“…24 Such territorial agreements, then, indirectly give rise to clusters of democracies that have joint interests in keeping a separate peace. The empirical analysis in Gibler (2007) indicates that exogenous predictors of border stability tend to decrease the likelihood of territorial disputes and increase the probability of joint democracy, and that the evidence for the democratic peace is weaker when predictors of border stability are controlled for. The conclusions remain in doubt, however, as Park & Colaresi (forthcoming) report inability to replicate the results.…”

Regime Similarity and Rivalry

“…Is it due to a Cold War influence, some institutional characteristic of single-party socialist states that actually makes them as dyadically peaceful as democracies, or not having territorial disputes? (On the last point see Gibler 2007). Finally, it is important to note that the research presented here does not falsify all preference-based arguments of international conflict.…”

Resource Curse in Reverse: How Civil Wars Influence Natural Resource Production

“…At the global level, systemic war may promote democratization in the international system (Mitchell, Gates, and Hegre 1999). Gibler's (2007) work suggests that the resolution of border disputes may be a key part of this process as well, as democratic regimes are more likely to emerge once violent territorial disputes have been settled.…”