Customer Reviews

From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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synder's book breaks down the fallacies of imposing democracy as the cure-all to violent ethnic conflict. the book is quite easy to read, even for folks with no political science background. snyder is particularly effective at laying down a systematic framework as to why emerging democratization often leads to violence, and then provides case studies that illustrate his points clearly. snyder isn't anti-democratization, but he is very wary when the process is started without certain institutions and conditions in place. if the bush administration read this book prior to invading iraq, we might have been able to avoid that catastrophe entirely.

This is no doubt one of the best books on democracy. It is at least as good as Hungtington's Political orders in changing societies, and The third wave. The author sees democracy as "conditionally good", or democracy is good because it is strategically conditional. The book, however, fails to go further to see that democracy is in fact only "culturally conditional". The God of universal democracy was dead, but too many people are unable or unwilling to accept it.

What makes this a great political science book is not merely the provocative counterintuitive claim regarding democratization (specifically partial democractization) offered by the author, but the solid, systematic and CLEAR (!) theoretical and empirical cases offer in support. A pleasure to read and a valuable contribution to scholarship and policy-making alike.

The book has its moments, but the conclusions are never compelling. His core mistake is that he never defines democratization. First, he conflates democratization and liberalization, which are two very different processes. As part of this, we never know when democratization begins or ends. Apparently German was democratizing for 45 years and Serbia for a century. Third, ethnic conflict has more to do with how authoritarian regimes governed than the fact that they disappeared, which would be clearer if he examined why so many ethnically diverse democratizing states have no significant rise in ethnic violence. Finally, many his policy presciptions go in the opposite direction of what a broad reading of the evidence would indicate.