One reason that Patrick I stepped down as a permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva was to develop ISQ Online as a forum for intellectual exchange surrounding International Studies Quarterly pieces. I think readers of the Duck will find the exchanges there interesting, and so I’ll be using (abusing?) my ‘standing guest’ privileges to call attention to them.
ISQ recently published—on early view—a piece by Michael Poznansky entitled “Stasis or Decay? Reconciling Covert War and the Democratic Peace.” In the final round of review, two of the referees proved very enthusiastic but one still expressed significant reservations. So we offered him the opportunity to have ‘the debate’ in public by authoring a rejoinder. The result, Tarak Barkawi’s “Scientific Decay.”
ISQ Online offers us the opportunity to continue these sorts of exchanges. Hence, we now have a symposium, “An Extended Debate on the Utility of the Democratic Peace Thesis.” In it, Poznanski and Barkawi go another round.
This is an important exchange. The fact of US cover interventions in democratic polities—including participating in the overthrow of democratically-elected governments—remains an ‘artifact’ of the democratic-peace hypotheses in need of explanation. Poznansky argues that:
Expectations surrounding a regime’s future status as a democracy determine the conditions under which democratic states will target their counterparts with covert force. If decision makers expect an existing democracy to break down—what I term an expectation of “democratic decay”—the restraints of democratic peace will atrophy, rendering these states susceptible to covert forcible regime change. Conversely, if decision makers anticipate that a regime will remain democratic—generating an expectation of “democratic stasis”—the constraints of democratic peace should obtain.
Barkawi, in contrast, argues that such explanations offer a “get out of jail free” card for the democratic peace. The crux of his objection: of course policymakers saw regimes such a Allende’s as a threat to the Washington-based order, but this misses the point. As he writes:
Poznansky winds up reinscribing the very ideological categories that American leaders used to justify often brutal and bloody anti-democratic projects as somehow “pro-democracy”. Rather than supporting democratic-peace theory, Poznansky’s article instead calls attention to the Cold War ideology and American exceptionalism that underwrites it.
This kind of exchange, even if sometimes heated, reflects the kind of thing that I think we ought to encourage. It juxtaposes the views of scholars who ‘come at the world’ differently but nonetheless can productively argue about matters of political and historical significance.
The original articles are ungated, thanks to Wiley, for a few more weeks. Go read them… and the extended debate!
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
- Dan Nexonhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/dhnexon
My big question, having read this: before assigning the MS to Barkawi, did you imagine circumstances under which he would recommend publication? His mind seems to have been made up about democratic peace theory – and this extension/amendment thereof – long before this MS crossed his desk. That’s not to say Barkawi doesn’t make some legitimate points, though his tone is off-putting (“think tank-level analysis”?).
Barkawi is an excellent and thoughtful referee. He definitely wears his “referee hat” differently than his “argument” hat—and the latter has a British-academia inflection. Moreover, he is one of the leading writers on the relationship between covert intervention and democratic-peace theory. My view is that his evaluation—along with those of the other reviewers—really improved the article. And that’s how peer review should work.
I think that it is important to note that covert action is not always a lethal or highly intrusive act. There are levels to covert action, which can include psychological operations through propaganda, there is funding, market manipulation, and a variety of other tools beyond outright attempts at overthrowing a regime. The harder question is not about whether the covert war undermines the DP, for I think that if we grant that it is a “war” then covert or not it seems to at the very least press on the universal claims of the DP, but what levels of coercive activity are permitted between two democracies when it isn’t all out war? What can the DP say, or indeed IR say, about below the threshold coercive attempts, particularly when the intent of the coercer is to remain unseen? Covert action has a long and not very nice history in this country, but then again, we only have the data points of the *failed* operations.
We only have the data points of the failed operations? What an earth do you mean? Iran, Chile, etc. did not fail. Clearly, covert action can take many forms but in most cases orchestrated by the U.S. (read, CIA) it involves funding and funnelling arms to third parties who will then overthrow the government. This kind of “coercive activity” (which is just a euphemism for undeclared illegal war) is not permissible by democratic peace theory. Intent to remain unknown is irrelevant.
The wider flaw at the heart of the democratic peace theory, as others have long discussed, is that its dependent variable (peace/war) is based on an essentially contested concept that is historically, geographically, and institutionally disparate. The United States does not, for instance, resemble in any way a democracy as compared to Switzerland. In fact, many would argue it to be an oligarchy: but few want to talk about the oligarchal peace, now do they? The whole theory- and this is what Barkawi has been talking about for ages- is based on reinscribing ideological categories: whatever the U.S. says is good = democratic, whatever the U.S. says is bad = non-democratic.
I’m not arguing that the democratic peace as ideological categories isn’t a bad argument. My point is that a covert action — by its very definition is to remain unknown. The definition–at least in this country is “an activity or activities [designed] to
influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is
intended that the role [of the intervening state] not be apparent or
acknowledged publicly.” Thus when the United States – or “CIA” or whatever – is known to have completed the operation, which could have achieved or not achieved its particular goals, if the role of the intervening state becomes acknowledged it has failed as a “covert” action. Moreover, there is a difference between war (i.e. hostilities) and other coercive activities that do not rise to the threshold of war. If you want to claim that any use of force amounts to war, this goes against almost all commonsense and legal thinking on the matter. Are sanctions uses of force? They are clearly coercive, but does that mean they are “undeclared illegal war”? No. And, the United Nations has ruled that one can impose economic coercive actions on states without violating Article 2(4). Is propaganda war? Then Voice of America seems to be waging war everywhere. Thus one must make room for all the other types of covert actions that do not collapse into a “war/peace” dichotomy because that is a false dichotomy.