Determinants of violence and escalation

Democratic peace theory, or DPT, has in recent academic studies had its explanatory power and validity questioned and examined. One of the contenders against DPT is civil-military relations. This paper aimed to examine whether democratic peace and civil-military relations could explain conflict behavior and conflict escalation in militarized interstate disputes, as opposed to the common method of analyzing conflict onset. This paper uses the quantitative and statistical method of multiple linear regression to find variables that significantly affect the dependent variable. The results show that level of democracy, civil-military relations, relative state power, and trade interdependence have significant effects on conflict behavior and escalation. Democracy has a strong deterring effect on conflict behavior and escalation, whereas military influence had an exacerbating effect. This study finds that both DPT and civil-military relations are important aspects to account when analyzing how conflict stakeholders behave