WPS4242 POST-CONFLICT TRANSITIONS WORKING PAPER NO. 15

**Democratic Jihad? Military Intervention and Democracy** 1

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# **Nils Petter Gleditsch, Lene Siljeholm Christiansen & Håvard Hegre**

Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Department of Political Science, University of Oslo & Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Abstract: Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocracies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in wartime, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democracies intervene militarily in on-going conflicts. The democratic peace may contribute to a normative justification for such interventions, for the purpose of promoting democracy and eventually for the promotion of peace. This is reinforced by an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention. Democracies may have a motivation to intervene in non-democracies, even in the absence of on-going conflict, for the purpose of regime change. The Iraq War may be interpreted in this perspective. A strong version of this type of foreign policy may be interpreted as a democratic crusade. The paper examines the normative and theoretical foundations of democratic interventionism. An empirical investigation of interventions in the period 1960–96 indicates that democracies intervene quite frequently, but rarely against other democracies. In the short term, democratic intervention appears to be successfully promoting democratization, but the target states tend to end up among the unstable semi-democracies. The most widely publicized recent interventions are targeted on poor or resource-dependent countries in non-democratic neighborhoods. Previous research has found these characteristics to reduce the prospects for stable democracy. Thus, forced democratization is unpredictable with regard to achieving long-term democracy and potentially harmful with regard to securing peace. However, short-term military successes may stimulate more interventions until the negative consequences become more visible.

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4242, June 2007 _The Post-Conflict Transitions Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about post-conflict development (more information about the Post-Conflict Transitions Project can be found at http://econ.worldbank.org/programs/conflict_ ). _An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in these papers are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at_ _<u>http://econ.worldbank.org</u> ._ 1 Earlier versions of this paper have been presented, inter alia, to meetings of the International Studies Association in Montreal (2004), the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Uppsala (2004), and the Conference on ‘Political Institutions, Development, and a Domestic Civil Peace’, Oxford (2005). Our work has been funded by the Polarization and Conflict Project (CIT-2-CIT-2004-506084), funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Program. It has also received support from the Research Council of Norway and the World Bank. We are grateful to participants in the conferences where the paper was presented for comments and also to a number of colleagues and associates at the Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO, for assistance, comments, and suggestions, particularly Joachim Carlsen, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Naima Mouhleb, Håvard Strand, Henrik Urdal, and Lars Wilhelmsen. We are grateful to Jeffrey Pickering for letting us use his data on military interventions. Lene S. Christiansen acknowledges a travel grant from the Department of Sociology and Political Science at NTNU. The dataset used here can be downloaded from <u>www.prio.no/cscw/datasets.</u>

> 2 _Nils Petter Gleditsch_ (nilspg@prio.no) is a Research professor at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), head of the working group on environmental conflict at PRIO’s Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW), editor of _Journal of Peace Research,_ and professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. _Lene Siljeholm Christiansen_

(lene.christiansen@riksrevisjonen.no) is an MA in political science from NTNU and was a Research assistant at CSCW when the first draft was written. This article relies heavily on her thesis (Christiansen, 2004). She now works for the Norwegian Office of the Auditor General, but that agency is in no way responsible for the views expressed here. _Håvard Hegre_ (hhegre@prio.no) is a Research professor at the CSCW and an Associate professor of political science at the University of Oslo.