Settled Borders and Regime Type: Democratic Transitions as Consequences of Peaceful Territorial Transfers

Douglas M. Gibler and Jaroslav Tir

American Journal of Political Science, 2010, vol. 54, issue 4, 951-968

Abstract: Research arguing that external threats determine regime type has generally failed to provide systematic evidence in favor of the peace‐to‐democracy hypothesis. We suspect that the lack of confirmatory findings is likely driven by conflating the concepts of negative (absence of conflict) and positive (mutual trust and cooperation) peace. By focusing on territorial issues and the phenomenon of peaceful state‐to‐state territorial transfers (i.e., peaceful alteration of borders), we are able to observe the effects of replacing territorial threat stemming from negative territorial peace (or territorial rivalry) with the positive territorial peace associated with legitimate, mutually accepted borders. Our findings support the expectations that peaceful territorial transfers remove active and latent territorial threat and lead to demilitarization and democratization. Importantly, peaceful territorial transfers are not endogenous to regime type. Our study therefore supports an alternative explanation for the democratic peace: both democracy and peace may be a function of settling territorial threats.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00473.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:54:y:2010:i:4:p:951-968

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().