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Deterrence, Democratic Peace - Coggle Diagram

- - - - A situation in which an actor realizes or believes that another specific actor is seriously contemplating attacking and undertakes to deter that attack by threatening retaliatory measures that negate any benefits likely to derive from an attack.
      - Superpower relations during the Cold War.
    - - Anticipating possible or potential threats, often hypothetical and from an unspecified attacker, and adopting a posture designed to deter other actors from even beginning to think about launching an attack (Patrick Morgan 2003).
      - Uk nuclear deterrent?
      - General nuclear proliferation
    - - Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)
      - Stable peace premised on both sides believing that they could not survive a sustained and massive nuclear attack.
      - Key components.
      - Each side maintain sufficient nuclear weapons to guarantee some would survive an initial attack, thereby enabling response capability
      - Each side develop a ‘second strike’ nuclear capability
      - Limited nuclear shelters
      - Strict limits on defensive missile systems to ensure mutual vulnerability - Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972).
    - - Would nullify MAD
      - Premised on belief that a nuclear war could be ‘won’
      - Strategic strikes of Soviet leadership (Centre of Gravity)
      - Missile defences – Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’)
      - From deterrence to compellence?
  - - - Can deterrence be deployed against non-state actors – in particular against terrorist groups?
      - Is terrorism a rational form of violence?
      - Are terrorists rational actors? What if they aren’t?
      - ‘Terrorism has a strategic logic’ (Pape)
      - Alex Wilner (2014 and Benmelech et al. (2010) suggest it is possible to deter terrorists through targeting things they hold dear (e.g. family members)
- - - - Dyadic (inter-state level): Are democracies more peaceful in their relations with democracies as opposed to non-democracies?
      - Yes, democracies clearly seem to be much less likely to fight militarized disputes against each other (e.g. Maoz and Russett)
      - But to claim democracies have never fought each other raises questions of how we define ‘war’ and ‘democracy’ and whether DPT is actually ‘liberal’ DPT
    - - (the whole): Is a world filled with more democratic states more peaceful?
      - Yes, as the number and proportion of democracies increases, war does appear to become less likely in the system.
      - But, correlation or causation?
    - - Militarised disputes (conflicts short of war) between democracies involve very few fatalities and are much less likely to escalate than disputes in mixed or autocratic dyads.
      - Democracies win the majority of wars they fight
      - Birds of a feather flock together – Democracies form alliances much more readily with other democracies than with non-democracies
      - Credible commitments – democracies are more likely to comply with international agreements than non-democracies.
      - Inoculation against civil war - fully established democracies are very unlikely to fall into civil war