The process of democratization is often violent in the short run, and democratic governments are more constrained in their use of force against insurgents than non-democratic authorities. But are democracies really more prone to political violence than other political systems? This is the theme of a short article published at the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) at ETH Zürich.
This summary article is based on recent quantitative studies of the relationship between democracy, democratization, and political violence. A longer review of this literature was recently published as an open-access article in Journal of Peace Research.
In a newly published article in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Håvard Nygård and I look at the importance of good governance defined more broadly when it comes to preventing the recurrence of armed conflict, and show that the outcome of politics is as important as the institutions decisions are made within. A preprint version is available here.
This post was originally published 12 May 2014 at Håvard Hegre’s private website.