Article Review: "Democracy and Armed Conflict"

The article on “Democracy and Armed Conflict” published by Journal of Peace Research, Havard Hegre, Professor at Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University spoke about the democracy and armed conflict relations, focusing on both conflicts internal to states and interstate conflicts.

Starting from the background of the democratic peace idea, Havard Hegre identified that idea of democracy rarely fight each other is origin from Immanuel Kant by citing his work: ‘The citizens of a (democratic) republic will hesitate before embarking on a war, for this mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war.’

To start the discussion, Harvard tried to provide supporting empirical evidence in both internal and interstates democratic peace. In internal and interstate democratic peace, he raised the empirical evidence from various studies from different scholars, namely Levy, Gleditsch, Micthell, Mukherjee, Buhaug, and so on. He, further, tried to explain the evidence of the relationship between democracy and armed conflict in both internal and interstate democracy peace. In internal conflicts point, he claimed that democratic states are less likely to have internal conflicts since it solves conflicts base on peaceful solutions. And democratic institutions play a signification role to alter the risk of internal conflicts by facilitating effective bargaining and reducing commitment problems. Moreover, in interstate conflicts point, he gave five different main explanations from different scholars on why democratic states rarely if ever have each other, including normative explanation, legislative constraints explanation, the ability of democracies to a single resolve explanation, mobilization argument, and joint interests of democracy states explanation.

In the discussed article, there are two main factors – socio-economic development and democratic institution - which effects to democracy and armed conflicts. However, Havard Hegre argued that socio-economic development factor is unlikely to bring lasting peace alone, without formal embedded in democratic institutions. He explained that democratic institutions are formal codifications of nonviolent conflict resolution procedures. Socio-economic development is likely to change societies such that nonviolent conflict resolution is an underlying Pareto-optimal equilibrium, allowing actors to agree to such codifications. In the absence of formal codifications, however, actors may be unwilling to trust that his underlying equilibrium exists. Hence, democratic institutions may be necessary to allow the beneficial change due to development to be manifested as more peaceful societies.

To support his argument on socio-economic development which is less likely to keep lasting peace, Havard explained that autocratic means to maintain order do not become more effective with increasing development. He took Syria as an example, which its relative economic development is not sufficient to prevent armed conflict.

In response to his argument on the mentioned point above, I would like to say that the argument is not strong enough. He missed looking on socio-economic development which leads states to more lasting peace in other countries. He should also look at China. China is a communist county which does not have a democratic institution. However, with strong socio-economic development, China is able to maintain peace inside the country without armed conflicts.