Review of book: Puzzles of democratic

peace theory, geopolitics and the

Transformation of world politics by
Karen Rasler and William R.Thompson

Submitted to: Sir Shabir Ahmad Khan

Submitted by: Umair Javed

Roll NO: 20

Class: MPhil

Session: 2018-2020(Evening)

Punjab University Lahore

Puzzles of the Democratic Peace theory, Geopolitics and the
Transformation of World Politics

With increasing interest in developing and evolving of intellectual world of international relations with
more scholars tend to use scientific method to evaluate existing paradigms into broad spectrum of
thoughts. In this extensive and intensive work, one can guess by turning initial pages that democratic
peace theory is not evaluated at level of modelling its fundamental proposition, rather alternative
paradigmatic thoughts were measured in conceptual tools of qualitative methodology as well statistical
tools of correlation and time series were used to analyse different dataset though already developed
indexes were used with idea of rearranging dataset to own requirement for variables.

Authors take venture of establishing alternative explanatory approach with minimum approach which
assumes that democratic peace theory entails peace between democratic states remaining other things
equal. However, within strand of maximum approach there are ten conditions that must be interpreted
to fulfil the criteria for democratic peace theory. These variables include community norm building, civil
society, electoral punishment, transparency, economic growth and development, external institutional
support and systemic leadership. Moreover, it is assumed that these variables are not mutually exclusive
and no single variable can explain the “democratic peace” on its own.

There is significant help from the previous researches of scholars. These authors put check on all the
work previous have done and bring about valid testable thoughts in the broader framework of solving
conundrum of democratic peace theory. Karl Deutsch’s work on security community where political
identities play significant role in interactions of democratic and autocratic states is outlined at onset. In
this book, work of Nazli Choucri and Robert North has been used to highlight that intense warfare and
gradual shift in trends of particular country’s tendencies to engage in war and possibility of peaceful
country entering into the war. Quincy Wright talks about democracy peace in terms of dyads of two
states. Wright broadly differentiate between democracy and autocracy as there is less chances to
control dissent in democracy and democracies are slow to respond to threat of war. Promotion of
international institution and democratic organization has been put on stage. If there are more
democratic states, then there are more chances of howling of despot in autocratic system.

In the leadership cycle framework, democratic forces are co-evolving force within in strand of autocratic
rule. With diffusion of roles to elsewhere because democratic wants other states to be like them, in this
case emergence of global leadership as given way for more creativity and innovation. There are wider
emulation and imitation at world level where actions are copied in some cases to other cases.

Rosecrance( 1986 ) trading state model has introduced two dominant strategies at international
scenario. One is “military-political” that delineates state’s ability to territorial expansion and relative
goals in seeking more area to be able to increase competitive outlook. Second strategy is constructed as
“trading state” which seeks to maximize the volumes of stock while maintaining relative harmony in
international environment.

Rasler and Thompson constructs the 24 hypotheses out these explanations to test with dataset with
already available work done and labouring some arduous work to complete the picture. One interesting
thing can be witnessed is reversal proposition is checked in order to secure two way understanding of
concept; they refer it chicken and egg conditions. In each and every chapter different hypotheses are
tested with COW (correlates of war) to check validity of democratic peace theory.