ABSTRACT
To students of world politics, democratization displays two types of puzzles. One is theoretical, and the other is empirical. The theoretical puzzle refers to a key debate between proponents of the democratic peace theory and those who maintain that democratization leads to war, at least in the short term.1 The empirical puzzle is between regions (and states within these regions) which democratized and became peaceful, or moved to higher levels of peace than existed before the democratization (for example, South America in the 1980s and Central Europe with the end of the Cold War), and regions in which democratization was followed by both internal and international violence (for example, the Balkans and some post-Soviet regions during the 1990s).
