Does Democracy Promotion Also Promote Peace?

     A democracy is a system of government controlled by the people, not by one certain group or individual. In the Declaration of Independence it states that “all men are created equal,” an idea which leads to the concept that all citizens should have the same rights, responsibilities, and influence in the governing of their country. In writing the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson was trying to break his ties with the harsh and non-democratic rule of the British and begin a new, equal society and government for America.

Democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, and is one with representative institutions and a rule of law.

What is democracy, do we really understand the concept and the implications of the freedoms that our society enjoys. Democracy by definition is a “government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections”.(1) The United States democracy in current times can be a difficult situation to grasp, due to the fact that we are operating off of the Constitution written over 200 years ago, and individuals modern

Democracy is the idea government of present day. Many nations are converting to a democratic image to improve and better their society and make the people have a “fair” government. Today, it may seem easy to do things such as voting and our own freedom, but the expansion of democracy back then was a struggle. During 1776- 1920, many attempts were made to expand/ create democracy to increase citizen participation in the government. Acts for rights for suffrage, equal rights for the “lower class”, women, and African Americans, and balanced government where no one directly controls the government like the monopolists did, helped form the way democratic governments are run today. Events such as the Civil War, protests that created amendments and

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Democracy is defined as a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. This definition is accurate in

Democracy, as a word, has many interpretations. Communist countries define themselves as economic democracies. Clearly the opposite is true due to the definition that the Founding Fathers of The United States used. Democracy is defined as having five key characteristics. These principles are the following: majority rule, equality, liberty, necessity of compromise, and individual worth. Majority rule, principle number one, can be broken down into two distinct categories, popular majority and representative majority. Popular majority, in its root definition, means that the majority of all the citizens or all voters are taken into account in the election of governmental offices. The second type of majority rule is representative majority. This

The Democratic peace thesis, whose basic concepts were studied by Kant in the 1700s, is the theory that suggests that democracies have been pacific in their relations with one other and are unlikely to go to war with another democracy. “Democracies rarely fight each other (an empirical statement) because (b) they have other means of resolving conflicts between them and therefore do not need to fight each other (a prudential statement),and (c) they perceive that democracies should not fight each other (a normative statement about principles of right behavior), which reinforces the empirical state¬ment. By this reasoning the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer potential adversaries we and other democracies will have and the wider the zone of peace.” russet

Democracy is considered as a peaceful entity and the world without war. American President Woodrow Wilson, for example, believes that “democracy is inherently peace desiring and consequently contributes to the world peace, replacing war-like political regime (Gat, 2006)”. Democracy is a system of government, consisted of four key elements. Firstly, it is a means of choosing the leaders of the citizens and replacing the government through an election. It is also called a representative democracy as people vote for their representatives to deal with problems and issues in their societies as well as in their states to improve the lives of citizens. Secondly, people actively participate in the public in a democracy. Democracy depends on the participation of the citizens, and it must be peaceful and open-minded of the various views of other groups and individuals. Thirdly, every individual has the rights, which the state cannot take away from him or her in a democracy. In other words, the human rights of all citizens are protected by the democracy. Finally, democracy is a system of rule by laws of people, not by individuals, and it maintains an order of the government and limits their power as well as protecting the rights of citizens. Every person is equal under the law (Barkawi and Laffey, 2001). Further, Democracy is widely supported by liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant, and liberalism is the leading theory, which supports democracy and identifies the

A democracy is when the common people are considered as the primary source of political power. Although democracy and absolutism had advantages and disadvantages, democracy was a more effective type of government for it limited royal power and protected the rights of the people socially, politically, and economically. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tension arose between the two different types of governments, the democracy and absolute monarchs.

Democracy as a form of government is usually exposed to different understanding, interpretations and even definitions. For some it is the solution and for others it is a problem. It is a term that is a fundamentally disputed concept—a concept that is at the heart of endless debates that although are not settled by any kind of argument, are nevertheless continued by all sorts of scholarly evidence. Democracy is a disputed concept because nearly everyone values the “ideal”, yet there are different legitimate but also incompatible criteria for judging whether the ideal is actually one to strive towards. In a perfect world, we as comparative thinkers would use concepts that reflect the uniqueness of each country and yet are simple enough to be relevant and measurable in every country. In reality and practice, the difficulty of gathering political information usually prevents scholars from achieving these goals so we tend to settle on concepts that focus on characteristics of democracy like Robert Dahl in his book, On Democracy, and Sheldon Wolin in his articles “Fugitive Democracy” and “Norm and Form”. These scholars lead us to question why

Democracy is a unique type of government, and the purpose of this essay is to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses that a democratic government provides. I will detail that many components of this type of society are both strengths and weakness as each component has beneficial aspects as well as unavoidable pitfalls.

It has also been suggested that a basic feature of democracy is the capacity of eligible voters to participate freely and fully in the life of their society.[14] With its emphasis on notions of social contract and the collective will of the eligible voters, democracy can also be characterized as a form of political collectivism because it is defined as a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.[15]

Violent civil conflict has been attributed to many reasons and there are indeed a web of factors that make violent conflict an issue from economic inequality to employment to deep rooted ethnic rivalry. The literature is indeed very rich. However while there are causes there are also factors that create a conducive environment for violent conflict and one area is the system of government. Systems of government present a classification through which we could assess the occurrence of violent civil conflict. Democracy is believed to have a pacifying power, the electoral processes, the rule of law and freedom from state oppression gives the population enough avenues to express grievances without resorting to full scale civil violence. This is drawn from the work of Kantian view that the representativeness of democracy makes it more difficult for the government to go to war seeing that it risks losing political power among the population who bear the brunt of war.[1] The democratic peace theory beyond mutual democratic pacifism, would thus have an impact on internal civil relations positively but this is not the case. However there have been an increased number of cases of civil and ethnic violence in government systems that we might consider to be in stages of democratization. Evidence would seem to suggest that there are greater levels of violent civil conflict in these sort of regimes as opposed to full blown dictatorships or

Theoretically, democracy is a stable form of government where power is in the hands of the people. In a democracy, people have the liberty to elect officials that best represent their interests, and political institutions exist as a result: Benjamin Constant argues in The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns that “true modern liberty is

There are two ways of thinking about the democratic peace theory, which are the structural and normative. According to the structural perspective, liberal democracies are able to avoid war because of constraints on the decision makers. Leaders are not all-powerful or able to misuse their power, decisions to go to war are well thought out, have gone through due processing and measures and involves the opinion of the people. The structural perspective of the democratic peace theory takes into account the structures liberal democratic states have in place that prevent them from going to war with other liberal states such as checks and balances, accountability to the people, limits to terms in office, pluralism and competition. According to Russett (1993, pp. 40), ‘In an economy of checks and balances, the division of power and the presence of public debate in the formulation of public