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Disturbing the Peace: African Warfare, Political Inversion and theUniversality of the Democratic Peace Thesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

Errol A. Henderson
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Abstract

This article tests the applicability of the democratic peace thesis tosub-Saharan African states by examining a ‘politicalinversion’ thesis. This suggests that the domestic politicalframework of African states compels their leaders to engage in internationalconflict, contrary to what the democratic peace thesiests: namely, politicallyopen African states are more likely to fight each other. This conclusion raisesthe issue of the universality of the democratic peace thesis; therefore, theextent to which the democratic peace is evident across other regions of theworld is examined. Empirical analyses of state dyads 1950–2001demonstrate that politically open African states are more likely to fight eachother and, moreover, the democratic peace does not hold in any region outside the West. These findings supportthe political inversion thesis of African conflicts and challenge the suggestionthat the spread of democracy will occasion international peace throughout theworld.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 25 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 W. E. B. DuBois, The World and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1987 [1946]), p. 2.

2 Jack Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18 (1988), 653–73; at p. 662.

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5 For example, Pierre Englebert, State Legitimacy and Development in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000); E. Gyimah-Boadi, ed., Democratic Reform in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004); Goran Hyden, African Politics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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7 Raymond Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that “Democracies Do Not Go to War with Each Other” ’, Review of International Studies, 20 (1994), 207–23.

8 Ali Mazrui, The African Condition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 117.

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13 Croft, ‘International Relations’, p. 609.

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16 On ‘new wars’, see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); on the clash of civilizations, see Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs, 72 (1993), 22–49. For a critique of the former, see Errol Henderson and J. David Singer, ‘“New Wars” and Rumors of “New Wars” ’, International Interactions, 28 (2002), 165–90; for a critique of the latter, see Errol Henderson, ‘Not Letting Evidence Get in the Way of Assumptions: Testing the Clash of Civilizations Thesis with More Recent Data’, International Politics, 4 (2005), 458–69.

17 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘On Economic Causes of Civil War’, Oxford Economic Papers, 50 (1998), 563–73; Errol Henderson, ‘When States Implode: The Correlates of Africa’s Civil Wars, 1950–92’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 35 (2000), 28–47; Rene Lemarchand, ‘Ethnicity as Myth: The View from Central Africa’, in Carolyn Pumphrey and Rye Schwartz-Barcott, eds, Armed Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp. 87–112; Yahya Sadowski, ‘Ethnic Conflict’, Foreign Policy, 111 (1998), 12–23.

18 See Stathis Kalyvas, ‘ “New” and “Old” Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?’ World Politics, 54 (2001), 99–118; Henderson and Singer, ‘ “New Wars” ’.

19 William Foltz, ‘Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival’ (book review) American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 971–72, p. 971.

20 Hardt and Negri’s neo-Marxist treatise, Empire, seems similarly irrelevant to Africa as suggested by David Moore, ‘Africa: The Black Hole at the Middle of Empire?’ Rethinking Marxism, 13 (2001), 100–18.

21 Jean-Francois Bayart, The State in Africa (London: Longman, 1993).

22 For example, see William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

23 This perspective is prominent in the ‘greed vs. grievance’ debate. See Mats Berdal and David Malone, eds, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

24 For example, Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman, eds, The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

25 See Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Nicholas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

26 See John Clark, ‘Realism, Neo-Realism and Africa’s International Relations in the Post-Cold War Era’, in Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, eds, Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 85–102.

27 Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Subaltern Realism: International Relations Theory Meets the Third World’, in Neuman, ed., International Relations Theory and the Third World, pp. 31–54; also see Steven David, ‘Explaining Third World Alignment’, World Politics, 43 (1991), 223–56.

28 Kalevi Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 206–7.

29 Barry Posen, ‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’, in Michael Brown, ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 103–24; Michelle Benson and Jacek Kugler, ‘Power Parity, Democracy, and the Severity of Internal Violence’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 42 (1998), 196–209; Errol Henderson and J. David Singer, ‘Civil War in the Postcolonial World, 1946–92’, Journal of Peace Research, 37 (2000), 275–99.

30 Ted Gurr, ‘Theories of Political Violence and Revolution in the Third World’, in Frances Deng and I. William Zartman, eds, Conflict Resolution in Africa (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 153–89.

31 For example, see Stuart Bremer, ‘The Contagiousness of Coercion: The Spread of Serious International Disputes, 1900–1976’, International Interactions, 9 (1982), 29–55; Jan Faber, Henk Houweling and Jan Siccama, ‘Diffusion of Wars: Some Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence’, Journal of Peace Research, 21 (1984), 277–88; Henk Houweling and Jan Siccama, ‘The Epidemiology of War, 1816–1980’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 29 (1985), 641–63. Conflict diffusion studies that focus primarily on Africa include: Harvey Starr and Benjamin Most, ‘Contagion and Border Effects on Contemporary African Conflicts’, Comparative Political Studies, 16 (1983), 92–117; Harvey Starr and Benjamin Most, ‘The Forms and Processes of War Diffusion: Research Update on Contagion in African Conflict’, Comparative Political Studies, 18 (1985), 206–29; Andrew Kirby and Michael Ward, ‘The Spatial Analysis of War and Peace’, Comparative Political Studies, 20 (1987), 293–313; John O’Loughlin and Luc Anselin, ‘Bringing Geography Back to the Study of International Relations: Spatial Dependence and Regional Context in Africa, 1866–1978’, International Interactions, 17 (1991), 29–61; also see Markus Kornprobst, ‘The Management of Boundary Disputes in African Regional Sub-Systems: Comparing West Africa and the Horn of Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 40 (2002), 369–93. In a related fashion, studies of democracy and conflict that focused on the spatial distribution of both have been applied to Africa; for example, see Mark Crescenzi and Andrew Enterline, ‘Ripples from the Waves? A Systemic, Time-Series Analysis of Democracy, Democratization, and Interstate War’, Journal of Peace Research, 36 (1999), 75–94.

32 Maoz applied his ‘resolve model’ of war outcomes to Africa; see Ze’ev Maoz, ‘Resolve, Capabilities, and the Outcomes of Interstate Disputes, 1816–1976’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27 (1983), 195–229.

33 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 139.

34 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

35 D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, ‘A Universal Test of an Expected Utility Theory of War’, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000), 451–80.

36 D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, The Behavioral Origins of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 189.

37 Douglas Lemke, Regions of War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

38 Arie Kacowicz, Zones of Peace in The Third World (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998).

39 The interstate war designation excludes two types of international wars: third-party interventions in civil wars, which COW classifies as ‘internationalized civil wars’; and colonial and imperialist wars, which COW classifies as ‘extrastate wars’.

40 Ali Mazrui, ‘The African State as a Political Refugee: Institutional Collapse and Human Development’, Journal of Refugee Law, 7, Special Issue (1986), 21–36, pp. 31–3.

41 Henderson, ‘When States Implode’.

42 These include Bremer, ‘Dangerous Dyads’; Bruce Russett and James Lee Ray, ‘Why the Democratic-Peace Proposition Lives’, Review of International Studies, 21 (1995), 319–23; Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’; Weart, Never at War; Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace.

43 Jeffrey Herbst, ‘War and the State in Africa’, International Security, 14 (1990), 117–39; Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

44 See Robert Barro, ‘Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106 (1991), 407–43; Pierre Englebert, Solving the Mystery of the AFRICA Dummy, World Development, 28 (2000), 1821–35.

45 Lemke, Regions of War.

46 Christoper Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of Survival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); also see Errol Henderson, ‘When Push Comes to Shove: The Domestic Roots of Africa’s International Conflicts’ (paper presented to the International Studies Association, Chicago, 2007).

47 Michael Bratton and Douglas van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa’, World Politics, 46 (1994), 453–89, p. 459.

48 Bratton and van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes’, p. 458.

49 Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

50 Jackson, Quasi-States, pp. 168–9.

51 Herbst, ‘War and the State’, p. 109.

52 On control of the capital city, see William Foltz, ‘The Organization of African Unity and the Resolution of Africa’s Conflicts’, in Deng and Zartman, eds, Conflict Resolution in Africa, pp. 347–66, at p. 359.

53 Grovogui derides Jackson’s thesis as ahistorical and too wedded to a notion of African peculiarity that ignores the persistence and promotion of juridical statehood among the putatively empirical states of Europe such as Belgium, Switzerland, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino. For him, Jackson’s analyses insufficiently historicize relationships that led to juridical statehood in Africa, which results in his rendering his sharpest critiques at domestic factors while absolving international factors that largely created, promoted and maintained the ‘rules of the game’ for reasons having nothing to do with ‘benevolence’ or the creation of a ‘less hostile’ international environment. See Siba Grovogui, ‘Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-Statehood and Other Myths in International Theory’, in Dunn and Shaw, eds, Africa’s Challenge to International Relations Theory, pp. 29–35. Also see Cirino Ofuho, ‘The Legitimacy and Sovereignty Dilemma of African States and Governments: Problems of the Colonial Legacy’, in Bakut tswah Bakut and Sagarika Dutt, eds, Africa at the Millennium: An Agenda for Mature Development (New York: Palgrave, 2000), at p. 105.

54 On the tradeoff, see A. F. Mullins, Born Arming: Development and Military Power in New States (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Herbst, ‘War and the State’.

55 ‘Neopatrimonial balancing’ is the modified balance of power strategy observed among African leaders, which accounts for the prevalent practice whereby leaders in neighbouring African states attempt to balance power not through massing troops on their borders but by providing reciprocal support for each other’s rebels; see Errol Henderson, ‘Neopatrimonial Balancing: Towards an Institutional Theory of Africa’s Wars’ (unpublished, Pennsylvania State University, 2006).

56 Among the more prominent predation theses are those focusing on ‘greed’, such as Paul Collier, ‘Doing Well Out of War’, in Mats Berdal and David Malone, eds, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000), pp. 91–111; or ‘warlordism’, such as Reno, Warlord Politics; or ‘criminalization’, such as Bayart, The State; or atavism theses, such as Anthony Clayton, Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa since 1950 (London: UCL Press, 1999).

57 Bratton and van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes’, p. 62.

58 Bratton and van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes’, p. 68.

59 Bratton and van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes’, p. 68.

60 Bratton and van de Walle, ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes’, p. 77. The authors distinguish five ‘modal regimes’ in post-colonial Africa: plebiscitary one-party systems, military oligarchies, competitive one-party systems, settler oligarchies, and multiparty systems’; see pp. 77–82.

61 For Englebert, State Legitimacy, legitimate states are those that maintain the institutional or societal integrity of their precolonial forms in the post-colonial era (i.e. vertical and horizontal legitimacy); and in this conceptualization are largely unrelated to democracy. The latter is evident in so far as Englebert’s two types of legitimacy are only modestly although positively correlated with democracy for African states (Pearson’s r = 0.03 and 0.08 (p ≤ 0.05), respectively). However, in Henderson, ‘Neopatrimonial Balancing’ I have differentiated political, social and popular legitimacy among African states. Popular legitimacy focuses on the popular support for the sitting regime associated with high levels of democracy and is proxied by the Polity regime score. Also see Henderson, ‘Push Comes to Shove’, p. 4.

62 Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, pp. 97–8. This argument converges with Kant’s view of the constraint on leader’s arbitrary decision to go to war occasioned by a republican form of government. The centrality of this argument is evident in so far as the ‘executive constraints’ component of the widely used Polity regime variable(s) ‘virtually determines the democracy and autocracy scale values’; therefore, it ‘virtually determines’ the finding in most quantitative studies of the democratic peace. See Kristian Gleditsch and Michael Ward, ‘A Revised List of Independent States since 1816’, International Interactions, 25 (1999), 393–413, p. 380.

63 Mark Peceny, Caroline Beer and Shannon Sanchez-Terry, ‘Dictatorial Peace’, American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 15–26, p. 19 (emphasis added).

64 Peceny et al., ‘Dictatorial Peace’, p. 19.

65 Peceny et al., ‘Dictatorial Peace’, p. 19.

66 Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Clapham, Africa and the International System, applies the ‘political survival’ thesis to Africa’s international relations.

67 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson and James Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

68 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic, p. 223.

69 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic, p. 235; for evidence challenging this assumption, see Michael Desch, ‘Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters’, International Security, 27 (2002), 5–47; Michael Desch, ‘Democracy and Victory: Fair Fights or Food Fights?’ International Security, 28 (2003), 180–94.

70 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic, p. 237.

71 According to Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic, p. 244, democracies might engage in MIDs against each other but not wars, except where a stronger one takes advantage of a weaker one.

72 On different types, levels and operationalizations of legitimacy among African states, see Englebert, State Legitimacy; and Henderson, ‘Neopatrimonial Balancing’.

73 One might contend that democracies might recognize this situation and accordingly select themselves out of conflict situations involving other democracies for this reason; but in that case African democracies should also be less likely to fight each other, albeit for reasons having little to do with extant arguments in the democratic peace literature.

74 Similarly, it contradicts Mansfield and Snyder’s thesis, which also supports the democratic peace thesis even as it argues that democratization may lead to conflict; see Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

75 For a fuller discussion of the political inversion thesis, see Henderson, ‘Neopatrimonial Balancing’.

76 For a brief summary of this work, see Errol Henderson, Democracy and War: The End of an Illusion (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner, 2002).

77 Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, ‘Polities and Peace’, International Security, 20 (1995), 123–46.

78 Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19 (1994), 5–49.

79 Douglas Lemke and William Reed, ‘Regime Type and Status Quo Evaluations: Power Transition Theory and the Democratic Peace’, International Interactions, 22 (1996), 143–64.

80 Erik Gartzke, ‘Kant We All Just Get Along? Opportunity, Willingness, and the Origins of the Democratic Peace’, American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 1–27.

81 Errol Henderson, ‘Neoidealism and the Democratic Peace’, Journal of Peace Research, 36 (1999), 203–31.

82 Ido Oren, ‘The Subjectivity of the “Democratic” Peace’, International Security, 20 (1995), 147–84.

83 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 208.

84 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 214 (emphasis in the original).

85 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 214.

86 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 214.

87 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 215.

88 Cohen, ‘Pacific Unions’, p. 215.

89 Russett and Ray, ‘Why the Democratic-Peace Proposition Lives’, p. 322.

90 Raymond Cohen, ‘Needed: A Disaggregate Approach to the Democratic-Peace Theory’, Review of International Studies, 21(1995), 323–5.

91 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’.

92 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, p. 180.

93 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, p. 180.

94 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, pp. 180–1.

95 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, p. 181.

96 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, p. 181.

97 Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’, p. 181.

98 On Asian cases, see Sumit Ganguly, ‘War and Conflict between India and Pakistan: Revisiting the Pacifying Power of Democracy’, in Miriam Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 267–300; Timo Kivimaki, ‘The Long Peace of ASEAN’, Journal of Peace Research, 38 (2001), 5–25. On Middle Eastern cases, see Miriam Elman, ‘Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon, 1982: Regime Change and War Decisions’, in Elman, ed., Paths to Peace, pp. 301–34. On Latin American cases, see Holsti, The State; Arie Kacowicz, ‘Peru vs. Colombia and Senegal vs. Mauritania: Mixed Dyads and Negative Peace’, in Elman, ed., Paths to Peace, pp. 335–69; and Kacowicz, Zones of Peace.

99 Douglas Lemke, ‘African Lessons for International Relations Research’, World Politics, 56 (2003), 114–38, pp. 120–1.

100 Lemke, ‘African Lessons’, pp. 116, 121.

101 Lemke, ‘African Lessons’, pp.131–6.

102 Gary King and Langche Zeng, ‘Explaining Rare Events in International Relations’, International Organization, 55 (2001), 693–715.

103 A recent study, Benjamin Goldsmith, ‘A Universal Proposition: Region, Conflict, War and the Robustness of the Kantian Peace’, European Journal of International Relations, 12 (2006), 533–63, also tests the universality of the democratic peace; however, it is largely an empirically rather than a theoretically driven assessment of the thesis; see pp. 536, 538. Utilizing a research design with a different temporal domain and estimation procedure without controls for the rarity of conflicts, it finds little support for the democratic peace thesis outside the West, while Latin American cases contradict it. He concludes that ‘regional dynamics clearly make a difference’, but maintains that ‘it cannot be concluded that the liberal peace is irrelevant outside of the West’ (p. 556). In an even more recent study, Erik Gartzke, ‘The Capitalist Peace’, American Journal of Political Science, 51 (2007), 166–91, uncovers regional variability in the democratic peace, which he associates with the influence of capitalism.

104 Gleditsch and Ward, ‘A Revised List of Independent States since 1816’.

105 Charles Gochman and Ze’ev Maoz, ‘Military Interstate Disputes, 1816–1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28 (1984), 585–615, p. 587.

106 Daniel Jones, Stuart Bremer and J. David Singer, ‘Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816–1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15 (1996), 163–213, p. 168.

107 Faten Ghosn, Glenn Palmer and Stuart Bremer, ‘The MID3 Data Set, 1993–2001: Procedures, Coding Rules, and Description’, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 21 (2004), 133–54.

108 John Oneal and Bruce Russett, ‘Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications: Trade Still Reduces Conflict’, Journal of Peace Research, 36 (1999), 423–42, state that their findings are robust using this specification.

109 King and Zeng, ‘Explaining Rare Events’, p. 700.

110 Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan Katz and Richard Tucker, ‘Taking Time Seriously in Binary-Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis’, American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 1260–88.

111 For example, Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace.

112 Regime scores for states not in Polity are estimated from Freedom House data using a linear prediction based on the Political Rights and Civil Liberties components. The correlation between the vectors of predicted and observed regime scores is 0.88. For a discussion of these data, see Kristian Gleditsch, ‘Modified Polity 4 and 4d Data, Version 1’ (Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego (2003), available at private http://www.essex/ac/uk/~ksg/Polity), at p. 2.

113 See Michael Mousseau, Havard Hegre and John Oneal, ‘How the Wealth of Nations Conditions the Liberal Peace’, European Journal of International Relations, 9 (2003), 277–314.

114 The CINC score is the average share of a state’s aggregate military personnel, military spending, iron and steel production, energy consumption, and urban and total population.

115 Findings based on an alternative specification of the power parity relationship utilizing the ratio of the higher to lower gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for the dyad are provided in Appendix Tables B1 and B2; and they are consistent with the findings based on CINC reported above.

116 Ghosn et al., ‘The MID3 Data Set’.

117 Kristian Gleditsch, ‘Expanded Trade and GDP Data’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 712–24.

118 See Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1982). Unlike COW, I include Sudan as an African rather than a Middle Eastern state.

119 For example, Bennett and Stam, Behavioral Origins.

120 Bennett and Stam, Behavioral Origins, p.184.

121 The graph also indicates that African autocratic dyads are less conflict prone than African democratic dyads. Interestingly, it is only in the very low anocratic to moderately autocratic area of the graph that African and non-African dyads behave similarly.

122 There are fifty-two dyads for which DemocracyLO = 9. Of these fifty-two, there are twenty-five (+9, +9) dyads and twenty-seven (+9, +10) dyads. Mauritius is the only African state that has a regime score of +10. Thus, the (+9, +10) dyads always include Mauritius.

123 See Kathy Powers, ‘Dispute Initiation and Alliance Obligations in Regional Economic Institutions’, Journal of Peace Research, 43 (2006), 453–71; and Henderson, ‘Push Comes to Shove’.

124 See Goldsmith, ‘A Universal Proposition’, pp. 542–5, 553, 556; and Gartzke, ‘Capitalist Peace’, 176–7, 180–1.

125 The coefficient is barely significant below the 0.10 level using a GDP based measure of relative capability; see Appendix Table B2.

126 There was no MID onset involving the two states in 1998. The armed conflict involving India and Pakistan in 1998 was part of the ongoing MID that began in 1993 and lasted until 1999 – culminating in the Kargil War. During this MID, India had a regime score of +8 from 1993 to 1994 and +9 from 1995 to 1998 and Pakistan had a regime score of +8 from 1993 to 1996 and +7 from 1997 to 1998. When this MID ended in 1999, Pakistan had a regime score of 0.

127 Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 234.

128 The most obvious exception is the relationship between trade interdependence and MID onset in Africa as noted above.

129 Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 109.

130 James Polhemus, ‘Botswana’s Role in the Liberation of Southern Africa’, in Louis Picard, ed., The Evolution of Modern Botswana (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 228–70.

131 Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila (London: Zed Books, 2002), pp. 153–7.

132 These factors converge in the ‘interpenetration of conflict’ phenomenon that characterizes so much of Africa’s international conflicts and reflects the neopatrimonial balancing strategy prevalent in the region. The ‘interpenetration of conflict’ is Crawford Young’s phrase that describes the reciprocal support African leaders provide to each other’s rebels, which often gives rise to international conflict; see Crawford Young, ‘Pluralism, Ethnicity, and Militarization’, in Ricardo Laremont, ed., The Causes of War and the Consequences of Peacekeeping in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002), pp. 37–57, at p. 52. Also see Henderson, ‘Push Comes to Shove’, p. 5.

133 The prevailing view is reflected in Gilbert Khadiagala’s contention that ‘weak states’, such as those found throughout Africa, ‘furnish fragile bases for regionalism’; see Gilbert Khadiagala, ‘Foreign Policy Decisionmaking in Southern Africa’s Fading Frontline’, in Gilbert Khadiagala and Terrence Lyons, eds, African Foreign Policies: Power and Process (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp. 131–58, at p. 149. On the mixed performance of African regional institutions, see Kathy Powers, ‘Regional Trade Agreements as Military Alliances’, International Interactions, 30 (2004), 373–95; Powers, ‘Dispute Initiation’; Errol Henderson, ‘Do Regional Institutions Reduce the Likelihood of International Conflict in Africa?’ (paper presented to the International Studies Association, Chicago, 2007). On the prospects for African regional institutions, see Economic Commission for Africa, Assessing Regional Integration in Africa (Addis Ababa: Economic Commission for Africa, 2004); Ademola Oyejide, Ibrahim Elbadawi and Paul Collier, Regional Integration and Trade Liberalization in SubSaharan Africa, Vol. 1 (New York: St Martin’s, 1997).

134 See Powers, ‘Dispute Initiation’; and Henderson, ‘Regional Institutions’. The former study suggests that security based regional institutions reduce the probability of interstate conflict in Africa, while the latter indicates that only non-security based regional institutions evince a conflict-dampening impact.

135 On the impact of contiguity and arms racing on war, see Bennett and Stam, Behavioral Origins; on religious dissimilarity and war, see Errol Henderson,‘Culture or Contiguity: Ethnic Conflict, the Similarity of States, and the Onset of Interstate War, 1820–1989’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41 (1997), 649–68; Errol Henderson, ‘The Democratic Peace through the Lens of Culture, 1820–1989’, International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), 461–84; Erik Gartzke and Kristian Gleditsch, ‘Identity and Conflict: Ties that Bind and Differences that Divide’, European Journal of International Relations, 12 (2006), 53–87.

136 On Bhutto’s initial orientation towards the Taliban, see Donna Foote, ‘One view of the Taliban: Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, describes her dealings with the Taliban’, Newsweek (Web Exclusive) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3067655/site/newsweek/from/RL.4/ 22 September 2001; on Bhutto’s call for jihad, see Sumit Ganguly, ‘War and Conflict between India and Pakistan: Revisiting the Pacifying Power of Democracy’, in Elman, ed., Paths to Peace, pp. 267–300, p. 298.

137 See Ganguly, ‘War and Conflict’; Kivimaki, ‘The Long Peace’; Elman, ‘Israel’s Invasion’; Holsti, The State; Kacowicz, ‘Peru vs. Colombia’; Kacowicz, Zones of Peace.

138 Russett and Ray, ‘Why the Democratic-Peace Proposition Lives’, p. 322.

139 Russett and Ray, ‘Why the Democratic-Peace Proposition Lives’, p. 322.

140 The bar for refutation of the thesis seems to shift over time; compare the discussion of testing the thesis in Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Ray, Democracy and International Conflict. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Maoz, ‘The Controversy over the Democratic Peace’; with that in James Ray, ‘On the Level(s): Does Democracy Correlate with Peace?’ (presented to the Norman Thomas Lectures on Scientific Knowledge of War, Vanderbilt University, 1997); Oneal and Russett, ‘Assessing the Liberal Peace’; Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace; and Mousseau et al., ‘How the Wealth of Nations Conditions the Liberal Peace’; James Ray, ‘Explaining Interstate Conflict and War: What Should We Control For?’ Conflict Management and Peace Science, 20 (2003), 1–31.

141 Nathaniel Beck, Gary King and Langche Zeng, ‘Theory and Evidence in International Conflict: A Response to de Marchi, Gelpi, and Grynaviski’, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), 379–389, p. 380.

142 William Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1996).

143 George W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States, 20 September 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf (13 June 2007), p. 3.

144 Russett argues that ‘only after the WMD threat was found to be nonexistent, and the costs to the United States and Iraq began to mount, did promoting a democratic peace emerge front and center as a post hoc justification for war’; see Bruce Russett, ‘Bushwhacking the Democratic Peace’, International Studies Perspectives, 6 (2005), 395–408, p. 396. In addition, Russett, like several analysts, incorrectly characterizes the American-led attack on Iraq as ‘preemptive war’; however, the term applies to situations in which the threat of war is imminent, which was not the case in the Iraq War of 2003. The war was ‘preventive’ in the sense that it was undertaken to prevent a perceived change in the relative power of an adversary seen to be increasing its capabilities. Pre-emptive war is supported in international law while preventive war is not. See Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Preventive War and U.S. Foreign Policy’, Security Studies, 16 (2007), 1–31, p. 2; also see Dan Reiter, ‘Exploding the Powder Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen’, International Security, 20 (1995), 5–34, pp. 6–7.

145 One of the glaring inconsistencies was the extensive US support for the regime of Pakistan’s military strongman, Pervez Musharraf, who rose to power through a coup d’état, and whose anti-democratic rule was condoned while his regime supported US efforts in the ‘war on terror’.

146 Thomas Carothers, ‘Democracy: Terrorism’s Uncertain Antidote’, Current History (December 2003), pp. 403–6, p. 403, agrees with Russett, ‘Bushwhacked’, p. 397, that a ‘medley’ of concerns led to the US invasion of Iraq; nevertheless, he maintains that ‘whatever the precise weight of these different factors, one of the motivations clearly was the desire to replace the thuggish, highly repressive Iraqi dictatorship with a democratic government, both to improve the lives of Iraqis and to help spread democracy elsewhere in the region – in part as an antidote to terrorism’. Also see Thomas Carothers, ‘Promoting Democracy and Fighting Terror’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (2003), p. 84, which was published prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Moreover, democracy promotion was a key feature of neoconservative foreign policy arguments since the 1990s; and a few days after the initiation of the ongoing war in Iraq, Bush stated that the three objectives of the invasion were ‘to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people’; see George W. Bush, ‘President Discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom’, President’s Radio Address, 22 March 2003 (Office of the Press Secretary, The White House: 〈http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030322.html〉). For a recent Bush administration argument, see Condoleezza Rice, ‘The promise of Democratic peace: why promoting freedom is the only realistic path to security’, Washington Post, 11 December 2005, p. B07.

147 Nevertheless, he argues that Bush misunderstands problems related to democratization and war that reduce the applicability of the democratic peace thesis to post-war Iraq; see John M. Owen IV, ‘Iraq and the Democratic Peace’, Foreign Affairs, 84 (2005), 122–7, p. 122.

148 See David Dunn, ‘Bush, 11 September and the Conflicting Strategies of the “War on Terrorism”’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 16 (2005), 11–33; at p. 24, which argues that ‘what NSS02 was in theory in September 2002, Operation Iraqi Freedom became in practice between March–May 2003’.

149 Layne, ‘Kant or Cant’, at p. 46; also see Henderson, Democracy and War.

150 Africa is often described as the ‘soft underbelly of terrorism’ – given its weak regimes, porous borders and considerable Muslim population – which was epitomized in the 1998 Al-Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed over 200 Africans and led to US attacks on suspected Al-Qaeda assets in Sudan (which turned out to be a pharmaceutical plant unrelated to Al-Qaeda). In December 2006, with US support, Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union regime, which the US administration suspected of harbouring members of Al-Qaeda including those associated with the East African attacks. On terrorism in Africa, see Tatah Mentan, Dilemmas of Weak States: Africa and Transnational Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2004).