ABSTRACT
Scholars working on Democratic Peace theory (DPT) have produced a number of hypotheses trying to explain whether, when, why, and against whom democracies wage wars. However, there has been much less attention to the closely linked question of how democracies fight. Indeed, the two main strands of DPT provide contradictory expectations regarding the ways in which democracies conduct war. On the one hand, the utilitarian strand postulates that democracies are reluctant to fight due to the unwillingness of their people to bear the economic and human costs of war. It posits that democracies are particularly sensitive to the loss of their soldiers’ lives which could lead them to targeting practices minimizing the threat to their armed forces at the expense of civilian casualties (Shaw 2002). Similarly, their desire to shorten the war could make democracies target dual-use facilities and infrastructure with severe consequences for civilians (Smith 2002; Thomas 2006). In short, when democracies fight they would tend to transfer the costs of war onto enemy civilians. In contrast, the normative strand of DPT states that democracies avoid fighting wars and if forced to defend themselves they take utmost care not to harm innocent civilians due to their liberal beliefs that ascribe equal moral status and inalienable human rights to all individuals irrespective of their national belonging.
