ABSTRACT
Neorealism is analytically potentially more attractive because it relies on variables that are material in nature and deemed to be easier to measure and quantify. A wealth of research currently focusing on the notion of the democratic peace thesis (DPT), how does this literature sit in relation to strategic culture. The DPT thesis would assume that zones of peace are established on the basis of common democratic polities. The corollary of this is that states derive pre-ordained preferences based on their democratic characteristics prior to interaction with each other, much in the same way that many neorealists assume pre-existing power-maximising or security-seeking identities. Strategic culture research originally emerged in the 1970s to explain apparent differences in the nuclear strategies adopted by the United States and the former Soviet Union. Jack Snyder, Colin Gray and others argued that analytical attention should be directed towards national cultural environments in order to understand how nuclear strategy was formulated.
