How important is democracy to post-conflict rebuilding and sustainable peace? About half of all post-conflict countries today have
some form of democratic governance. But many are semi-democratic regimes in which, typically, electoral processes and legislatures are at the whim of autocratic executives. In 2008, a total of 86 countries had consistently democratic regimes, 28 were autocracies, and the remaining 45 were anocracies, a term we use for hybrid regimes (Pate, Chapter 4). The empirical evidence is compelling that factional, semi-democratic regimes are fragile and subject to failure, whether through armed challenges or institutional failure or both. In fact competitive elections in such regimes often precipitate armed violence and massacres, as happened in Kenya in 2008.
Consistently democratic regimes are unlikely to be challenged by civil wars in the first place. If fully democratic institutions can be established after wars, economic redevelopment is more rapid, the risks of conflict recurrence are less, and transitional justice is more effective (Hegre and Felde, Chapter 8; Meernik et al., Chapter 10). Democracies also have a relatively good track record of reducing political discrimination against minorities, thereby reducing the salience of one major source of grievance around which anti-regime movements coalesce (Pate, Chapter 4). And democratic regimes have a better record of incorporating women into the political process (Caprioli et al., Chapter 9). Yet women seldom are recognized participants in peacemaking or societal reconstruction. So opportunities are lost that might give women more leverage to minimize the risks of war recurrence.
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