Democratization and international conflict during and after the third wave

Of the three sides of the liberal virtuous triangle, only the domestic regime-type is so empirically robust that the axiom that democracies do not wage war against each other “comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law.” There are three forms of democratic peace: monadic (democracies are more peaceful in their international relations), dyadic (democracies do not go to war with other democracies), and systemic (more democratic states make the international system more peaceful). Due to the Third Wave of democratization, the concept of democratic governance approached the level of normative universality. Yet, there remain challenges related to the robustness of the democratic project and the robustness and directional causality of the democratic peace. Furthermore, categorizations of both peace and democracy are contested, with theoretical and practical exceptionalism to the universal narrative of the democratic peace. The article concludes that just as the Third Wave of democratization was insufficient universally to achieve perpetual peace, so too the third wave of autocratization will prove insufficient universally to undermine resilience within the democratic (or polyarchic) peace project.