Symposium: Even Dictators have Friends: Autocratic Cooperation in the International System

[This is a post-publication review symposium.] In the 1990s and early 2000s, conflict scholars, especially those in the quantitative tradition, probed and prodded democratic peace theory and generally agreed that the phenomenon of peace (i.e., non-interstate war) to be an empirical reality for democratic pairs of states. [1] Understanding democratic state behavior is now a pillar of conflict research and includes examining crises behavior, war, foreign-imposed regime change, terrorism, intrastate war, and many other topics. Although scholars explained where and when democracies increase or reduce conflict behavior, they paid comparatively less attention to autocratic states. In addition, the cooperative behaviors of certain regime types in the international system have often been treated as simply the lack of conflict. With democracy stalling or rolling back in both Latin America and the Middle East, understanding the external behavior of autocratic states is increasing in importance. [...]