Revisiting the democratic peace practice: Interstate violence in multi-actor crises, 1918-2005

This article addresses democratic peace practices in a multi-actor arena. It introduces a typology of international crises and spells out hypotheses on patterns of interstate violence in situations with state adversaries alone compared with those with states and non-state actors (NSAs). The findings on 447 International Crisis Behavior (ICB) crises, from 1918 to 2005, show that about half of the cases were multi-actor in type, both within and outside the democratic zone. The democratic peace assertions were supported in crises with states alone, shuttered but still persisted in multi-actor cases with ethnic NSAs, and reversed in multi-actor confrontations with non-ethnic NSAs. These findings make actor diversity a challenging theoretical refinement for democratic peace research on crisis and war.