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Democracies do not take up arms against each other. Although this axiom has attained the status of a mantra in the field of international relations, this statement is much more complex than it appears, in part because it is highly contingent on the definitions and operationalizations of both democracy and conflict. This article revisits democratic peace theory, combining both institutional constraints and similarity-based arguments. Interactions between the democratic level of the dyad (the average democratic level of its members) and its democratic spread (difference between the democratic scores of its members) create a dyadic triangle that encompasses all possible combinations of cases, revisiting which dyads are more prone to conflict. The findings partially confirm and partially refute both the institutional constraints and the similarity-based arguments, leading to a nuanced alternative theory: the Interactive Model of Democratic Peace. Akin to democratic peace theory, our evidence shows that the higher a dyad's level of democracy is, the lower the probability of fatal militarized interstate disputes between that pair of states. However, contrary to democratic peace theory, we find that dissimilar-regime dyads can still be peaceful as long as they have a high mean of democracy. Following the theory of regime similarity, we consider the democratic spread of each dyad, but we find that being similar is not a sufficient condition for peace between the members of a dyad. From the empirical evidence, the article derives three heuristic zones of conflict, filling much of the gray area that has been left unexplained by previous models.

This study tries to explain the reasons why Peru and Ecuador went to war with each other in 1995, even though both are democracies. The research was conducted concerning Immanuel Kant's Democratic Peace Theory by examining norms and institutions as essential factors in developing his theory. This study uses qualitative research with literature review and interview methods. The study will focus on the conditions of norms and institutions in Peru and Ecuador in 1995, the year the two countries decided to go to war with each other. Based on the research results, it is known that democratic norms and institutions owned by Ecuador and Peru have not been able to create peace as has been assumed by Immanuel Kant in the Democratic Peace Theory. Although Ecuador has democratic institutions that can reduce the authority of its leaders in decision-making, the domestic democratic norms established in the 1830 Constitutional Law cannot make the Ecuadorian people's support refer to peace in overcoming the Cenepa border conflict. On the contrary, in Peru, democratic norms that prefer to negotiate and make peace are not followed by the effectiveness of the role of democratic institutions that cannot limit President Fujimori's authority, who chooses to carry out attacks in border areas which then triggers a war.

We explore US covert forcible actions against democratic governments and their citizens and show that interdemocratic use of covert force is common and can be accommodated within the theory of democratic peace. Grounded in the Perceptual Theory of Legitimacy, we argue that democracies are constrained by public perceptions of their legitimacy from overtly aggressing against other democratic states. When democracies desire to aggress against their democratic counterparts, they will do so covertly. We test the assumptions of the theory and its implication with (1) laboratory studies of the conflation of democracy with ally status and (2) historical analyses of covert militarized actions and prisoner detention, which show that US forcible actions, when carried out against democracies and their citizens, are carried out clandestinely.

Research on the 'democratic peace' has neglected the fact that democracies fight wars that no one else would, particularly to preserve international law & to prevent human disasters & large-scale violations of human rights. What is more, data on average probabilities of democratic war involvement have obscured that there have been vast differences in democracies' use of military force. This article demonstrates that the causal mechanisms of established approaches to the democratic peace do not preclude democracies' involvement in war. Most importantly, the ambivalence of the Kantian tradition allows for two competing logics of appropriateness that can be used to construct two ideal types: whereas, militant democracies conceive of their entire relation to non-democracies as antagonistic, & frequently fight wars to de-throne dictators, pacifist democracies believe in a modus vivendi with autocracies & try to assist their transformation into democracies. 2 Figures, 98 References. Adapted from the source document.

In recent times, 'just war' discourse has become unfortunately associated, in the minds of some, with the idea of the forcible promotion or imposition of democracy as a legitimate just cause. It would thus be understandable if supporters of just war theory were to disavow any particular linkage of its tenets with the democratic ideal. However, while certainly not endorsing the stated cause, this article contends that the theory in its most plausible and attractive form does exhibit certain biases towards the ideal, in both jus ad bellum and jus post bellum. If these biases fall short of shackling the theory to claims such as 'only democracies can fight just wars', they may nevertheless place taxing justificatory burdens on a non-democracy's claim to have a war-waging right and on non-democratic conceptions of the just peace that should ideally follow a just war.

The Russo-Ukrainian war may have given democratic peace a new lease of (research) life. The stronger-than-expected reaction of liberal democracies coupled with the poorer-than-expected battlefield performance of the Russian military, invites us to re-apply the logic of democratic peace. To understand the strong reactions of liberal democracies, I apply a militant interpretation of Kant's perpetual peace and reexamine the role of trade interdependence in capitalist peace. To understand the battlefield performance of Ukraine, I examine theories of war-fighting with an emphasis on the legitimacy mechanism. To understand the battlefield performance of Russia, I examine the deleterious impact of corruption and preference falsification ( vranyo). To the extent that the field is still generating novel research that advances our understanding of the impact of regime type on international conflict, democratic peace remains a progressive research programme.