Covert operations, wars, detainee destinations, and the psychology of democratic peace
Abstract
We explore US covert forcible actions against democratic governments and their citizens and show that inter-democratic use of covert force is common and can be accommodated within the theory of democratic peace. Grounded in the Perceptual Theory of Legitimacy, we argue that democracies are constrained by public perceptions of their legitimacy from overtly aggressing against other democratic states. When democracies desire to aggress against their democratic counterparts they will do so covertly. We test the assumptions of the theory and its implication with (1) laboratory studies of the conflation of democracy with ally status, and (2) historical analyses of covert militarized actions and prisoner detention, which show that US forcible actions, when carried out against democracies and their citizens, are carried out clandestinely.
Citation
Crandall , C , Cox , O , Beasley , R & Omelicheva , M 2018 , ' Covert operations, wars, detainee destinations, and the psychology of democratic peace ' , Journal of Conflict Resolution , vol. 62 , no. 5 , pp. 929-956 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002716669572
Publication
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0022-0027Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright The Author(s) 2016. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002716669572
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.