Academic

Riker on Democratic Peace & Decent Societies

By Lawrence Solum

Walter Riker (University of West Georgia) has posted The Democratic Peace is Not Democratic:On Behalf of Rawls' Decent Societies (Political Studies, June 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The democratic peace is secured not simply (if at all) through explicitly democratic institutions as such, but through a number of social and political norms and institutions commonly associated with democracies. In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls claims that the conditions that secure the peace between democracies can be found in his non-democratic, non-liberal 'decent' societies too. I argue that the situation is more complex than Rawls suggests, but that he is still largely correct. Since decent societies pose no special threat to global peace, then the democratic peace thesis does not justify efforts to democratize them. This argument is part of Rawls?s larger defense of decent societies.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).