Resumen de Contiguous states, stable borders, and the peace between democracies

Douglas M. Gibler

• Park and Colaresi find that border stability does not apply to non-contiguous states. This just confirms, again, an argument I have been making in numerous publications since my original �Bordering on Peace� article. Nevertheless, I use this response to present a replication of my original argument, as it applies to contiguous states, and I find strong support for the contention that the democratic peace can better be understood as a stable border peace. I also discuss several different replications of the original argument using different proxies for stable borders. Each confirms that joint democracy is not a statistically significant predictor of conflict once stable borders are also included in the model. In sum, arguments from the territorial peace have been confirmed in multiple analyses, with multiple data sets, using multiple levels of analysis, and this renders Park and Colaresi's attack on the original �Bordering on Peace� a non sequitur in the debate over stable borders as an explanation of democracy and peace.