On March 4 and 5, 1996, the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control, in conjunction with the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, convened a research planning conference on "Police Reform in States under Transition." The conference was unusual in that its primary purpose was to foster an ongoing discussion between academics working in the area of democratization and police reform, and policymakers running police reform programs in countries such as Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, South Africa, and EI Salvador. Our primary goal for the conference was to construct a research agenda that would allow continued dialogue between scholars and policymakers, and would focus on questions of theory and practice immediately applicable to policymakers in the field.

Participants in the conference included Robert Perito, Special Advisor to the Director of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), U.S. Department of Justice; Frederick Mecke, Director, Office of International Criminal Justice, U.S. Department of State; Arnstein Overkil, Police Major General of Asker and Baerum Police Headquarters in Norway, and advisor to the Palestinian Authority on policing; Diana Gordon, Chair of the Department of Political Science at City College of New York; Louise Shelley, professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University; William Stanley from the Department of Political Science at the University of New Mexico; Jeffrey Ian Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Justice; and faculty and staff from Stanford University and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

During the Cold War, the United States carried out a number of covert actions against elected governments in the Third World. Critics of the "democratic peace" suggest these covert operations are potential invalidations of, or at least exceptions to, the proposition that liberal democracies rarely or never wage war on one another. Democratic peace theorists, however, argue that the targets of these covert actions were not long-term, stable democracies, that covert action falls short of interstate war by Correlates of War (CoW) criteria, and that the covert nature of these operations meant that liberal norms and institutions in the United States did not have an opportunity to function. Even so, by forcing the executive to use covert means, democratic institutions may have prevented the higher level of international violence known as war, although they were not robust enough to prevent covert action. Liberal interventionist and anti-communist ideology provided policymakers with a justificatory frame for intervention which, however, did not amount to war between democracies.

In response to scores of requests, this textbook edition of Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries has been abridged to convey the core arguments of the book in a format appropriate for classroom use.

The authors explore the complex and reciprocal interactions between a society's dominant beliefs, values, and attitudes about politics and the nature of its political system. Among the issues they address are: to what extent is political culture cause or effect; how can its causal importance for democracy be weighed; what are the most important elements of a democratic political culture; and how are these elements developed over time?

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The war in El Salvador is over. On January 16, 1992, in Mexico Citys ornate Chapultepec Castle the government of President Alfredo Cristiani and the rebel Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) formally signed a comprehensive peace treaty, putting an end to 12 years of conflict.

As 1992 began, the scene of Americas most prolonged military involvement since Vietnam presented images unimaginable just a few months before. In Mexico City, after unexpectedly signing the peace agreement in person, President Cristiani strode across the podium to shake hands with all five FMLN commanders as participants on both sides cried openly. In El Salvador a sea of FMLN flags filled San Salvadors Civic Plaza in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral, where the army once massacred political dissidents; the cathedral itself was draped with an enormous banner of the assassinated Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. A ceremony held to observe the commencement of the formal ceasefire was especially poignant: army officers and rebel commanders stood together at attention to sing the Salvadoran anthem on a dais decorated with the flags of El Salvador, the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the FMLN. The rival commandants then accompanied President Cristiani to light an eternal flame in commemoration of the more than 75,000 Salvadorans who died in the tiny countrys war.