Triangulating War: Network Structure and the Democratic Peace

Decades of research has found that democratic dyads rarely exhibit violent tendencies, making the democratic peace arguably the principal finding of Peace Science. However, the democratic peace rests upon a dyadic understanding of conflict. Conflict rarely reflects a purely dyadic phenomena---even if a conflict is not multi-party, multiple states may be engaged in distinct disputes with the same enemy. We postulate a network theory of conflict that treats the democratic peace as a function of the competing interests of mixed-regime dyads and the strategic inefficiencies of fighting with enemies' enemies. Specifically, we find that a state's decision to engage in conflict with a target state is conditioned by the other states in which the target state is in conflict. When accounting for this network effect, we are unable to find support for the democratic peace. This suggests that the major finding of three decades worth of conflict research is spurious.