  Decades of research has found that democratic dyads rarely exhibit violent
tendencies, making the democratic peace arguably the principal finding of Peace
Science. However, the democratic peace rests upon a dyadic understanding of
conflict. Conflict rarely reflects a purely dyadic phenomena---even if a
conflict is not multi-party, multiple states may be engaged in distinct
disputes with the same enemy. We postulate a network theory of conflict that
treats the democratic peace as a function of the competing interests of
mixed-regime dyads and the strategic inefficiencies of fighting with enemies'
enemies. Specifically, we find that a state's decision to engage in conflict
with a target state is conditioned by the other states in which the target
state is in conflict. When accounting for this network effect, we are unable to
find support for the democratic peace. This suggests that the major finding of
three decades worth of conflict research is spurious.
