?
The Grand Challenges in the Quest for Peace and Democracy
Peace and democracy are intertwined concepts. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1796, proposed that, if ‘the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise’. Kant therefore suggested that a ‘republican constitution’ offers the potential to achieve ‘a perpetual peace’ (translation by Nisbet, 1991, 100). In more recent decades, the notion that ‘democratic or liberal states never or very rarely go to war with each other’ (Gat, 2006, 73) has been further developed and debated. Nevertheless, peace studies and democracy studies have tended to take different directions.
Academic research on the attainment of peaceful societies and democracy remains underdeveloped. Furthermore, the consequences and implications of achieving peace and democracy, and the wide variety of actors involved, lack conceptualization. The interactions between these processes and actors with the wide range of political regimes developed across the globe remain on the agenda of scholars and policymakers. This essay outlines a number of the key challenges facing peace and democracy studies as we enter the new decade of the 2020s. It aspires to advance our understanding of crucial empirical and theoretical questions and to establish a better dialogue between the fields of peace studies and democracy studies.