ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications the democratic peace proposition, originally developed for understanding the phenomenon of an almost total absence of wars between dyads of democratic countries in international relations, can have for the sphere of interethnic relations. The rapidly developing body of scholarly work known as the ‘ democratic peace’ literature asserts the relevance of domestic politics to understanding patterns of international interactions. Extensive research on the relationship between democracy and international conflict has revealed major empirical patterns that, taken together, constitute a most remarkable phenomenon of human interactions in world politics. The basic idea that autocracy or dictatorship is an important cause of war that can be eliminated by democracy, because democratic states will have peaceful relationships with each other, has philosophical roots that antedate the debates by almost two centuries. Systematic quantitative and qualitative studies of the phenomenon of democratic peace and its theoretical explanation are quite a recent development.
