UMBC logo  Undergraduate Researchers  Jacob Keener  Jacob
Keener, Political Science  "Rethinking the Liberal Democratic
Peace Hypothesis"  The purpose of this research is to inquire
into the various meanings of the word democracy and to use the
knowledge from that inquiry to investigate the democratic peace
theory, which holds that states with democratic forms of
government tend to be more peaceful than non-democracies. A
substantial amount of research has been done about democracies
and war, including the democratic peace theory by international
relations scholars, but much of this research has taken the
meaning of democracy for granted. At the same time, political
philosophers have written at length about the meaning of
democracy, but both groups do so in their separate spheres. The
nexus of international relations and political philosophy is a
sparsely-researched area and both fields would be better served
by research that takes into account both theoretical philosophy
and empirical research. Through this