Democratic Peace Theory, R.I.P.

The rise, and potential fall, of a mainstay academic theory.

Two women pose for selfies outside a fast-food restaurant in the athletes village of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic games in Gangneung on February 8, 2018. October 28, 2025, 9:05 AM Comment icon View Comments ( )

Some social science theories have remarkable staying power; others turn out to have a more limited shelf life. Sometimes a once-promising idea just doesn’t seem to lead anywhere—Talcott Parsons’s structural-functionalist approach to sociology might be one example—and eventually most scholars abandon it and move on. Or a novel theoretical argument can sound compelling when it first appears, but subsequent research reveals its logical or empirical limitations. In other case

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