The essays in this ambitious volume take as their foil the democratic peace hypothesis: the claim that liberal democracies, while still going to war against nonliberal states, rarely wage war on one another. “This volume challenges the received international wisdom about democracy, liberalism, and war,” write the editors in the Introduction. “The democratic peace, with its transhistorical causal law based on fixed definitions of democracy and war and a nation-state ontology of the international, is far too simplistic a frame from which to analyze the various historical and contemporary configurations of democracy, liberalism, and war” (p. 2).