Reexamining International Space Collaboration: The Perspective from the Democratic Peace Theory

This paper studies the space collaboration between the US and Russia in the International Space Station (ISS). The Democratic Peace Theory states that democratic and nondemocratic countries are less likely to cooperate than two democratic countries. However, the US-Russia partnership in the ISS is an exception, as the two countries established substantial collaboration. This paper proposes two hypotheses to explain this exception. I argue that other than regime types, countries’ differences in relative comprehensive capacity and countries’ specific domain capacity should be considered in determining the likelihood of international collaboration. To support the hypotheses, the paper closely examined both historical records and quantitative data. The study demonstrates that US-Russian space cooperation was viable due to asymmetries in power and specialized aerospace technology capacity. The paper predicts that future US-China partnerships could only occur with the two requirements above and further analyzes the partnership under the Prisoner’s Dilemma Lens.