Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes result in the least democides.
[4] To give some perspective on these numbers, Rummel stated that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed in combat around 41 million.
[31] The definition of democracy used by Rummel is "where those who hold power are elected in competitive elections with a secret ballot and wide franchise (loosely understood as including at least 2/3 of adult males); where there is freedom of speech, religion, and organization; and a constitutional framework of law to which the government is subordinate and that guarantees equal rights."
A deeper explanation is that where people are free, they create an exchange society of overlapping groups and multiple and crosschecking centers of power.
"[32] While democide requires governmental intention, Rummel was also interested in analyzing the effects of regimes that unintentionally, yet culpably, cause the deaths of their citizens through negligence, incompetence or sheer indifference.
An example is a regime in which corruption has become so pervasive and destructive of a people's welfare that it threatens their daily lives and reduces their life expectancy.
"[47] Rummel was critical of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, alleging that they were seeking to establish an authoritarian, one-party state.
[52][53] The democratic peace theory is one of the great controversies in political science[citation needed] and one of the main challenges to realism in international relations.
Criticism of the democratic peace theory include data, definition, historical periods, limited consequences, methodology, microfoundations, and statistical significance criticism, that peace comes before democracy, and several studies fail to confirm democracies are less likely to wage war than autocracies if wars against non-democracies are included.
Jeffrey Pugh summarized that those who dispute the theory often do so on grounds that it conflates correlation with causation, and the academic definitions of democracy and war can be manipulated so as to manufacture an artificial trend.
It was reviewed in 1992 as having "immoderate pretensions", and demonstrated Rummel's "unrelenting" economic liberalism and "extreme" views on defense policy.
Other researchers such as Stuart A. Bremer found that it is a chance or stochastic matter;[59] in this sense, Rummel's version of the democratic peace theory was deterministic.
[58] A review by James Lee Ray cited several other studies finding that the increase in the risk of war in democratizing countries happens only if many or most of the surrounding nations are undemocratic.
The opening paragraphs of an appendix from his book Power Kills[2] adopt Michael Doyle's lists of liberal democracies for 1776–1800 and 1800–1850.
Doyle used a much looser definition, namely the secret ballot that was first adopted by Tasmania in 1856, while Belgium had barely 10% adult male suffrage before 1894.
[65] Critical reviews of Rummel's estimates have focused on two aspects, namely his choice of data sources and his statistical approach.
[5][10] The statistical approach Rummel used to analyze big sets of diverse estimates may lead to dilution of useful data with noisy ones.
Even if the criticisms were valid, a figure lower by 10 or 20 or even 30 percent would make absolutely no difference to the general conclusions that Rummel draws.
An example of this is in the Tito's Slaughterhouse chapter of Statistics of Democide, where Rummel quotes estimates for the democide record of Tito's Yugoslavia from authors who were sympathetic towards the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and who attempted to downplay or deny the crimes of Ustaše in the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, an example of those authors being Ivo Omrčanin, a former NDH official in foreign ministry and an espouser of fascist ideals.
[67] This award recognizes a person "whose singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency in the international studies community.
According to the series' website, Never Again is "a what-if, alternative history" in which "two lovers are sent back in time to 1906 with modern weapons and 38 billion 1906 dollars" in order to prevent the rise of totalitarianism and the outbreak of world wars.
[72][nb 2] Most books and articles by Rummel are available for free download at his Freedom, Democide, War website, including those not listed here.