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The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons . By Scott D. Sagan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 286p. $29.95.

The normative understanding that promotes peaceful resolution of societal conflicts within democracy may be generalized to relations between nations espousing similar democratic beliefs. Accordingly, it may not be considered legitimate or necessary to resort to violence against other democracies, nor is aggressiveness from them feared (making preemptive attacks unnecessary). The same reasoning does not apply to relations between democracies and autocracies. At the same time, structural and institutional constraints stand to play a role, since democracies are constrained from going to war by the need to ensure the support of public and a consensus between branches of government (although this may make them somewhat more vulnerable to aggression by autocratic states). Using a continuous (though rather complex) measure designed to assess the degree of a country's adherence to democracy and controlling for a variety of possible confounding factors (e.g., wealth), Russett examines the respective impact of measures of institutional constraints and normative restraints on war-proneness of pairs of nations during the past half-century. He concludes, as did previous studies that used a binary (democracy-nondemocracy) measure of political system, that while democracies are not less belligerent in general, they are certainly more peaceful in their relations with each other. In addition, his analysis suggests that democratic norms provide a more powerful inhibition to warfare among democracies than do institutional constraints (which, nevertheless, remain influential). One of the book's original contributions resides in the empirical domains within which the relationship between democracy and peace is tested. A variant of the test is applied to the system of Greek city-states of the late fifth century B.C., though the results prove somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, city-states that could, by some definition, be characterized as democracies did fight each other less often than those who probably or certainly were not democracies. On the other hand, those that were most unambiguously democracies did fight more often than predicted. Still, this finding might be distorted by the fact that all of the wars between clear democracies were part of the Athenian campaign against Syracuse, not completely independent events. (Also, the democracies were disproportionately naval powers, with an ability to project power and, hence, to fight.) A variant of the test is also applied to nonindustrial societies, that is, populations that contiguously inhabit a territory, speak a common language and contain political units of various levels of aggregation (e.g., bands, villages, districts). Controlling for size of political unit and the effect of insularity, Russett finds that political units characterized by a high degree of political participation (a surrogate measure for democracy in a preindustrial society) are unlikely to fight each other. Accordingly, the relation between democracy and peace seems robust: it holds when a number of confounding factors are controlled for, and it applies to a wide variety of empirical domains. One could quibble about certain technical details of analysis. For example, it may sometimes be hazardous to infer the power of political norms from a country's political stability and its lack of political violence (the Soviet Union displayed both qualities over numerous decades). Nevertheless, the book combines rigor and relevance, maturity and originality; it takes the democracy-peace link further than it has yet been taken and draws thoughtful policy implications from empirical research. Perhaps most importantly, it suggests that the political realist's Hobbesian conception of world politics may be decreasingly relevant in a world of democracies; and it urges us to take more seriously than political realism ever could the proposition that "the policies of states in international relations, and their peoples' support for those policies, derive in large part from their fundamental values and images."