CPSA, St. Catharines 29 May, 2014 Urban 1 Between friends Trust and the flawed internal logic of democratic peace theory Michael Crawford Urban Balliol College, University of Oxford urban.michael@gmail.com Paper prepared for the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meeting Brock University St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada 27-29 May, 2014 Abstract: While Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) has long benefitted from a robust debate focused on the empirical validity of its central claim that liberal states tend not to fight one another, this discussion has not translated into an equally vigorous consideration of the internal validity of the causal models proposed to explain this empirical regularity. In this paper, I examine two of the most persuasive explanatory models of the liberal peace, namely those presented by John Owen in his book Liberal Peace, Liberal War and Charles Lipson in his offering Reliable Partners. Based on a careful interrogation of these works and their internal logic, I argue that while quite different in the explanations they offer, both suffer from a similar flaw, namely, that both models implicitly rely on an under-theorized willingness of liberals to trust other liberals for their logical coherence. Having identified this flaw, I proceed to assess the extent to which the assumptions on which these models rest provide the basis for filling this aforementioned trust-shaped hole. In so doing, I engage with the limited scholarship on trust that already exists in IR. Finding neither model – nor existing IR scholarship on trust – capable of accommodating the form of trust needed to support the causal weight placed on it by its’ respective author’s theoretical architecture, I conclude by sketching the outlines of the type of trust required to play this role. In so doing, I mount an argument for re-conceiving DPT so as to include Constructivist and Psychological/Cognitivist insights. Comments most welcome but please do not cite without permission