There must be 50 ways: Participating in democracy #39: Be a peaceworker

The relationship between peace and democracy is a complicated one, but the trend seems to be that each fosters the other. From the theories of Immanuel Kant, who wrote the germinal Toward Perpetual Peace, to the many researchers who opine about Democracy Peace Theory (DPT), it is clear when we examine the history of wars that democracies almost never go to war against other democracies (Simpson, 2019). 

Thus, working for peace generally[1] is working for democracy, and working for democracy is generally working for peace.

If your country is low on the democracy rankings and you are working for peace, that enhances the chances that democracy will improve in your country.

If you are working to change your despotic government into a democracy, doing so with peaceful means will more likely result in improved metrics of democracy, statistically speaking (Karatnycky & Ackerman, 2005).

All this is not to make an obviously ahistorical claim that democracies do not wage violent conflict. Not only is there political violence in democracies, there are innumerable cases of democracies waging war on nondemocracies. But the tendency is that working for peace is inextricably tied to working to strengthen democracy.

The contamination of peace by deterioration in democracy and participation in violence toward other nondemocracies is possibly most clear in the US, where Freedom House[2] ranks 57 countries as more free than the US, but the Global Peace Index[3] puts 131 other countries as more peaceful than the US.

Freedom of expression is a right that, if unused, may well tend to erode that right, and expressing ideas for more peace is a way to sustain our rights in a democracy even as it works for peace.

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/09/15/is-democracy-good-for-peace/

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores

[3] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/#/

References

Karatnycky, Adrian & Ackerman, Peter (2005). How freedom is won: From civic resistance to durable democracy. New York, NY: Freedom House.

Simpson, S. (2019). Making liberal use of Kant? Democratic peace theory and Perpetual Peace. International Relations, 33(1), 109–128. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1177/0047117818811463