No Professional Soldiers, No Militarized Interstate Disputes?

In Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant presents six preliminary articles for perpetual peace beforethe three well-known definitive articles about republic constitutions, commercial relations, and international organizations. In his third preliminary article, Kant argues that “Standing Armies ( miles perpetuus) Shall in Time be Totally Abolished” because they are themselves “a cause of offensive war.” Empirical results based on state-of-the-art data analysis that refers to both peace-years correction and distributed-lags logistic regression showthat the most obvious among the neglected preliminary articles by Kant—military manpower system—is indeed connected to involvement in militarized interstate disputes during the period from 1886 to 1992. For neo-Kantian peace theory and research, this means that a military manpower system with conscripted, notstanding (i.e., professional or voluntary), soldiers is associated with disputes.