The purpose of this thesis is to inquire into the hard decisions that democracies are making in the 21st century in the context of working to spreading democracy and maintaining peace through foreign policy. Ever since the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terror attacks, democratic peace theorists have been pushed further to the sidelines as their theory has been put to the test and struggled to stand up to the challenges of political realities in contemporary world politics. The idea that the diffusion of democracy would help build a Kantian world peace would seem to have taken a severe blow with the rise of populist candidates and policies in the West in recent years. The democratic peace theory (DPT) is in crucial respects about the mechanisms to indirectly control other countries' economies and politics through forcibly installing democratic regimes. Though done in the name of safety and security for western nations, this foreign policy looks an awful lot like an attempt at biopolitical engineering. Has DPT morphed into a form of biopolitics? The goal of this thesis is to delve into this question and to learn what the implications are if this is the case, and what it means for the West, democracies, terrorism, and societies. For if democracies are less and less able to justify their role in driving the proper conditions for peace, we must scrutinize the role they play in international affairs in a much broader political perspective. / Master of Arts / The purpose of this thesis is to see, in the post-Cold War world, what kind of association that democracies have with other states around them. As the world sees more and more democracies take root, it is worth studying what kind of relationship these democracies have formed with both other democracies and non-democracies. Democratic governments have in some cases forced democracy upon parts of the world that have never sought democracy. With this in mind I will look at the spread of democracies all over the globe through the theory of biopolitics. This theory is the idea that a government must control its population, even the reproduction of it. Policies on abortion, the death penalty, and end of life laws might seem controversial to some but to a government are very necessary to ensure the safety and promotion of life in a state. If countries are forcibly spreading democracy to others countries that are not, are they trying to control a population in another place? This thesis seeks to answer that question within the context of the modern world that we live in.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78249 |
| Date | 23 June 2017 |
| Creators | Nagy, Michael Lewis |
| Contributors | Political Science, Nelson, Scott G., Stivachtis, Yannis A., Dixit, Priya |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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