Democratic peace theory... for terrorism?
This New Republic article made me think about democratic peace theory and the Global War on Terrorism.
The article simply mixes Strangelovian nuclear fascination/terror (see Graham Allison) with anti-Bushism, but the lede paragraph raises an interesting point.
* Do the London attacks -- and specifically that many of the suspects are British citizens -- render the theory useless as a model for studying terrorism? What is their impact on the ability of this theory to be used as a framework for viewing the GWOT?
Hmm.
I've considered myself a proponent of democratic peace theory, and still do, but recent terrorism attacks have proved to be a sticky wicket in the defense of such a theory. It suggests, if you're not familiar, that liberal democratic states do not go to war with each other.
There is, of course, more to it that that, and significant evidence has been compiled by the University of Michigan's Correlates of War project to quantitatively analyze armed conflict of the past few hundred years.
Anyway, terrorism. There does not appear to be an abundance of literature applying the theory to terrorism.
The current administration, though, has been quick to point out the value of democratic states in relation to peace. This occured regularly in the months leading up to the recent Iraq war. In fact, if one were looking for a list of criteria that the "Axis of Evil" states (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) have in common, it would prominently include 1. non-democratic government, 2. seeking to acquire WMD, and probably 3. supportive of terrorism.
The non-democratic nature of Axis of Evil states was essential to their inclusion in the group.
Does it explain Sept. 11?
With the Sept. 11 attacks, democratic peace theory seems to hold up as an accurate model for analyzing terrorism, since all of the hijackers came from non-democratic states. It was the theory in action, on an individual level.
The men were citizens of non-democratic countries – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. (Egypt and Lebanon, despite some recent improvements, are still not up to Western standards of democracy.)
In addition to states of origin, other non-democratic states played a role. Afghanistan, after Osama bin Laden was sought in connection with the attack, refused to assist in turning him over. This led to war. Bin Laden, raised in Saudi Arabia, had lived in Sudan after being expelled from his home country in 1991.
So the theory makes sense in this application -- the states significantly associated with the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks all happen to be non-democratic. Non-democratic states, then, seem to have in some way enabled the attacks to occur.
"Associated" and "enabled" probably need to be defined. Perhaps we'll say that if a terrorist has spent time in or been a citizen of a state that seems to have fostered or explicitly or implicitly encouraged terrorism, that might indicate an association. Taliban-run Afghanistan and Hamas-funding Iran provide good examples.
A problem arises when we consider that some Sept. 11 hijackers -- the Hamburg cell, of course -- studied in Germany, and some attended flight training in the United States. Both countries are democratic.
So democratic peace theory doesn't explain all associated countries, but at least the most-associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers. Some states seem to produce terrorists or be popular travel/work destinations for future terrorists, and they tend to be non-democratic.
Other states, non-democratic and democratic alike, had slight associations with Sept. 11 hijackers, but no democratic states could claim them as citizens or seemed to have been aware of their impending acts.
Between 9/11 and 3/11
The citizenship of terrorists did not remain such a dependable variable in subsequent attacks, with American citizen John "the American Taliban" Walker Lindh caught in Afghanistan, and British citizen Richard "the shoe bomber" Reid attempting to detonate explosives in a plane.
However, the "associations" with non-democratic states exist for Lindh, because he studied in Yemen, Pakistan, and of course fought U.S.-supported troops in Afghanistan.
For Reid, though, there is no "non-democratic" explanation. He spent most of this life in Great Britain, leaving only for Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and finally, the United States. Mostly democratic.
The only way democratic peace theory could explain Richard Reid is if in Egypt he attended some sort of state-sanctioned terrorism training, was funded by Egypt, or something similar. There is no evidence of this.
Madrid: March 11, 2003
Most of the suspects (including the three who died in apparent suicide in April, 2004) are or were from Morocco, a state that is still transforming out of its non-democratic status. Its first parliamentary elections were in 2002, so the Morocco the apparent terrorists grew up in was quite non-democratic.
Other suspects have or had citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt. Consistent with the theory.
A handful, though, are in fact Spanish citizens. But most of the Spaniard suspects seem to have only been involved in illegally assisting in providing explosives, and might not have been aware of the specific plot.
Madrid suspect info comes from this BBC site.
London
With London, though, the theory faces some challenges.
As far as the July 7 bombings, which killed 56 and wounded more than 700, the four men believed to have been responsible were British citizens.
Two of them visited Pakistan in 2004, but other than that, the attacks seem --unlike Sept. 11 -- to have come from within.
The July 21 failed bombings, similarly, has mostly home-grown roots.
Some of the suspects moved to Britain in their early teens from Somalia or Eritrea, but even British authorities they seem to have picked up their radicalism in Western Europe -- the birthplace of liberal democracy.
###
Democratic peace theory still provides a consistent model for evaluating traditional conflicts, but struggles to explain acts by non-state actors.
Is there any value in the theory when studying the act of one citizen against his own democratic state?
Has the 1990s shift in the balance of power combined with technological advances -- making non-state actors influential in ways previously unimaginable -- rendered the theory useless?
###
One conclusion: democratic peace theory seems to be weak at best at explaining terrorism when the terrorists can't be clearly linked to specific, culpable states; showing such a link becomes virtually impossible when the guilty parties are citizens of a democratic state and have seldom or never left.
Update: I amended my definition of democratic peace theory after Miguel's comment.
The article simply mixes Strangelovian nuclear fascination/terror (see Graham Allison) with anti-Bushism, but the lede paragraph raises an interesting point.
* Do the London attacks -- and specifically that many of the suspects are British citizens -- render the theory useless as a model for studying terrorism? What is their impact on the ability of this theory to be used as a framework for viewing the GWOT?
Hmm.
I've considered myself a proponent of democratic peace theory, and still do, but recent terrorism attacks have proved to be a sticky wicket in the defense of such a theory. It suggests, if you're not familiar, that liberal democratic states do not go to war with each other.
There is, of course, more to it that that, and significant evidence has been compiled by the University of Michigan's Correlates of War project to quantitatively analyze armed conflict of the past few hundred years.
Anyway, terrorism. There does not appear to be an abundance of literature applying the theory to terrorism.
The current administration, though, has been quick to point out the value of democratic states in relation to peace. This occured regularly in the months leading up to the recent Iraq war. In fact, if one were looking for a list of criteria that the "Axis of Evil" states (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) have in common, it would prominently include 1. non-democratic government, 2. seeking to acquire WMD, and probably 3. supportive of terrorism.
The non-democratic nature of Axis of Evil states was essential to their inclusion in the group.
Does it explain Sept. 11?
With the Sept. 11 attacks, democratic peace theory seems to hold up as an accurate model for analyzing terrorism, since all of the hijackers came from non-democratic states. It was the theory in action, on an individual level.
The men were citizens of non-democratic countries – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. (Egypt and Lebanon, despite some recent improvements, are still not up to Western standards of democracy.)
In addition to states of origin, other non-democratic states played a role. Afghanistan, after Osama bin Laden was sought in connection with the attack, refused to assist in turning him over. This led to war. Bin Laden, raised in Saudi Arabia, had lived in Sudan after being expelled from his home country in 1991.
So the theory makes sense in this application -- the states significantly associated with the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks all happen to be non-democratic. Non-democratic states, then, seem to have in some way enabled the attacks to occur.
"Associated" and "enabled" probably need to be defined. Perhaps we'll say that if a terrorist has spent time in or been a citizen of a state that seems to have fostered or explicitly or implicitly encouraged terrorism, that might indicate an association. Taliban-run Afghanistan and Hamas-funding Iran provide good examples.
A problem arises when we consider that some Sept. 11 hijackers -- the Hamburg cell, of course -- studied in Germany, and some attended flight training in the United States. Both countries are democratic.
So democratic peace theory doesn't explain all associated countries, but at least the most-associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers. Some states seem to produce terrorists or be popular travel/work destinations for future terrorists, and they tend to be non-democratic.
Other states, non-democratic and democratic alike, had slight associations with Sept. 11 hijackers, but no democratic states could claim them as citizens or seemed to have been aware of their impending acts.
Between 9/11 and 3/11
The citizenship of terrorists did not remain such a dependable variable in subsequent attacks, with American citizen John "the American Taliban" Walker Lindh caught in Afghanistan, and British citizen Richard "the shoe bomber" Reid attempting to detonate explosives in a plane.
However, the "associations" with non-democratic states exist for Lindh, because he studied in Yemen, Pakistan, and of course fought U.S.-supported troops in Afghanistan.
For Reid, though, there is no "non-democratic" explanation. He spent most of this life in Great Britain, leaving only for Israel, Egypt, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and finally, the United States. Mostly democratic.
The only way democratic peace theory could explain Richard Reid is if in Egypt he attended some sort of state-sanctioned terrorism training, was funded by Egypt, or something similar. There is no evidence of this.
Madrid: March 11, 2003
Most of the suspects (including the three who died in apparent suicide in April, 2004) are or were from Morocco, a state that is still transforming out of its non-democratic status. Its first parliamentary elections were in 2002, so the Morocco the apparent terrorists grew up in was quite non-democratic.
Other suspects have or had citizenship in Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt. Consistent with the theory.
A handful, though, are in fact Spanish citizens. But most of the Spaniard suspects seem to have only been involved in illegally assisting in providing explosives, and might not have been aware of the specific plot.
Madrid suspect info comes from this BBC site.
London
With London, though, the theory faces some challenges.
As far as the July 7 bombings, which killed 56 and wounded more than 700, the four men believed to have been responsible were British citizens.
Two of them visited Pakistan in 2004, but other than that, the attacks seem --unlike Sept. 11 -- to have come from within.
The July 21 failed bombings, similarly, has mostly home-grown roots.
Some of the suspects moved to Britain in their early teens from Somalia or Eritrea, but even British authorities they seem to have picked up their radicalism in Western Europe -- the birthplace of liberal democracy.
###
Democratic peace theory still provides a consistent model for evaluating traditional conflicts, but struggles to explain acts by non-state actors.
Is there any value in the theory when studying the act of one citizen against his own democratic state?
Has the 1990s shift in the balance of power combined with technological advances -- making non-state actors influential in ways previously unimaginable -- rendered the theory useless?
###
One conclusion: democratic peace theory seems to be weak at best at explaining terrorism when the terrorists can't be clearly linked to specific, culpable states; showing such a link becomes virtually impossible when the guilty parties are citizens of a democratic state and have seldom or never left.
Update: I amended my definition of democratic peace theory after Miguel's comment.
posted by bp at
3:26 PM
1 Comments:
Just a minor point. Democratic states aren't necessarily less likely to go to war (in general, since they CAN be attacked by non-democratic states). But no two democratic states have ever gone to war against each other. That's the key difference, the way I see it.
Then again, it's just a correlation. No two countries w/ a McDonalds have ever gone to war w/ each other either, for what it's worth.
By
Miguel Centellas, at 5:55 PM
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