A review of Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier.
About the Author
Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy.
What distinguishes liberal societies from all others is that they tolerate immoral behavior. It is this tolerance that protects us not just from our leaders but ourselves.
Conventional scholarly wisdom holds that ethnic diversity within a given society generally dims democracy’s prospects. Careful reflection on the experience of many post-Soviet states, however, suggests that this need not…
