ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the existing literature about the democratic peace. However, it does not have the ambition to review that literature in a comprehensive fashion. Rather, in line with the social–theoretical nature of this book's intervention into the debate, I focus on the social–theoretical assumptions that inform and structure most research on the democratic peace, including its assessments of the political significance of the “fact of democratic peace.” The chapter argues more particularly that its commitment to an individualist ontology ultimately leads research on the democratic peace to attribute merely “epiphenomenal” status to the finding, as a further result of which it fails to come to terms with the “politics” of democratic peace. I show how this assessment applies, albeit in different ways, to both mainstream and critical research on the democratic peace.
