Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Rebecca Tapscott for her exceptional editorial assistance.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. With the exception of one book chapter, Mansfield and Snyder (Citation2012a) never systematically examined the relationship between democratisation and civil war. Other scholars have taken the lead in that literature.
2. Bogaards (Citation2010) and Bernhard et al. (Citation2017) show that the measure of democratisation makes a big difference for the coding of cases and, by consequence, for any conclusions about the relationship between democratisation and war.
3. According to Babayev and Mahmudov (Citation2023) the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh followed a similar pattern. Azerbaijan attacked Armenia after the new democratic government in Armenia increasingly resorted to nationalism and ‘provocations’ in its power struggle with the old elites. This led the ‘outraged’ Azeris (the word is used fifteen times), to attack.
5. This seems to be case with Arugay (Citation2021). His encyclopaedia entry reviews the debate about Mansfield and Snyder's (Citation1995) early article, not their later book. In fact, Arugay (Citation2021) contains no sources published after 2005
7. See, for example, Liu (Citation2017) and Denison and Wiegand (Citation2021). Liu challenges the ‘excessive pessimism regarding the effects of democratisation’ on peace (Liu Citation2017, p. 1480). Denison and Wiegand find no evidence that incomplete democratisation is significantly related to militarised territorial conflict management. They explain this with the strong incentives for leaders in new democracies to find peaceful solutions (Denison and Wiegand Citation2021, p. 744).
8. Prompted by Mansfield and Snyder (Citation1995), the exchange in International Security Vol. 20, Issue 4, in 1996, is as much about autocratisation and war as about democratisation.
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Notes on contributors
Matthijs Bogaards
Matthijs Bogaards is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute in Italy and has worked in Costa Rica, Germany, Hungary, South Africa and the United Kingdom. He is specialises in comparative politics. His research interests include democratisation, ethnic conflict, democracy in divided societies and political institutions.
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