ABSTRACT
The concepts of war, peace, and democracy The basic constituents and building blocks of theory are concepts; thus one of the first tasks in theorizing is defining the relevant concepts. However, defining concepts is not as straightforward as sometimes assumed, as concepts used in the social sciences are essentially contested. Being essentially contested implies having several existing meanings of a concept, at least some of which are reasonable and legitimate, and all of which are grounded within a normative framework. Take peace, war, and democracy. Peace is understood differently in the various theories of IR. The realist conceptualization of peace is the absence of war (Waltz, 1959: 1). For realists, this absence is temporary; peace is but a break between wars. If peace is defined by the absence of war, then war is also a fundamental concept of democratic peace theories. War further becomes a subject to contested conceptualizations, as it too has several definitions and explanations. For instance, Brown defines international war as “violence between organized political entities claiming to be sovereign nations” (Brown, 1994: 1). Clearly, this definition contains other contested concepts, such as “violence,” “political,” “nations,” and “sovereignty.” We are seized in an unending conceptual path, a need for defining increasingly derivative concepts. And the realist conceptualization of peace is not the only one. Boulding (1979) would see this realist view of peace as unstable, even immoral. Real peace equals “stable peace” – “a situation in which the probability of war is so small that it does not really enter into the calculations of any of the people involved” (Boulding, 1979: 13). This idea is different from the realist conceptualization of peace as the absence of war. The alternative is a peace that would not easily slip into war – a moral peace with normative and material dividends. When stable peace of this kind exists, as it does between the United States and Canada, few resources are invested to ensure military protection against the stable peace partner and a security community can be achieved, one in which resources can be used to enhance justice and prosperity. Yet also this conceptualization implicates many more derivative concepts, such as interests, calculations, rationality, or legitimacy. Deutsch’s idea of the “security community” offers another plausible explanation of stable peace (Deutsch et al., 1957), which invokes a common identity. We are caught again on an unending conceptual and morally laden path. The third concept – democracy – is another definitional minefield. Gallie (1956) used democracy in his seminal article as a paradigmatic example of an essentially contested concept. Two broad paradigms of democratic theory exist. The first paradigm is elitist, structural, formal, and procedural. It tends to understand democracy in a minimalist way (see, for example, Schumpeter, 1962; Lippmann, 1955; Przeworski, 1999). A regime is a democracy when it passes a certain structural threshold and has free and open elections; autonomous branches of government; division of power; and checks and balances. This precludes a tyrannical concentration of power in an elite.
