Electing to fi ght: emerging democracies and international instability

The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union led to widespread hopes that countries in the former Eastern bloc would undergo transitions to democracy and thereby contribute to peace and stability in the region. These hopes rested largely on the fi nding that war has never broken out between mature democracies.2 Various observers extrapolated from the existence of a “democratic peace” to argue that any regime change toward democracy will reduce the risk of confl ict.3