Description
Book SynopsisLiberal democracies very rarely fight wars against each other, even though they go to war just as often as other types of states do. John M. Owen IV attributes this peculiar restraint to a synergy between liberal ideology and the institutions that...
Trade ReviewIn an ambitious book that covers one hundred years of US diplomacy, Owen persuasively demonstrates that perceptions of a foreign state before an international crisis shape interpretations of its actions during the crisis: liberals 'judge states based on their domestic political institutions, and maintain those judgments through smooth and rocky relations with those states.' Thus, the extent to which US liberals perceived a foreign state to be liberal affected whether they were likely to treat it as potentially aggressive or benign.... Owen makes an important contribution to the democratic peace literature by highlighting the influence of domestic vision on foreign policy thinking: whether states interpret foreign powers as dangerous depends less on their material capabilities for war than on the attractiveness of their political ideologies and institutions.
-- Miriam Fendius Elman * The International History Review *
This illuminating work, by a political scientist at the University of Virginia, seeks to explain why liberal states (those with free speech and competitive elections) avoid war with one another but not with illiberal states.
-- David C. Hendrickson * Foreign Affairs *
