ARTICLES 

A number of useful explorations have been carried out in the Western academic community on the issue about how democracies defend/should defend themselves in the face of internal threats, which are not so well known by the Chinese academia. Starting with the internal challenges that today’s Western democracies are faced with, this paper gives a brief account of the rise of modern democratic defense in Germany and the current state of democratic defense research. On the whole, normative theoretical studies on democratic defense have made great progresses, while the relevant empirical analysis obviously lags behind. In view of this situation, this paper calls for a “re-discovery” of comparative politics in the study of democratic defense and constructs a new analytical framework for exploring the domains and objects of democratic defense, which will help scholars transcend the current research paradigm dominated by legal professionalism and philosophical speculations, promote the integration of democratic defense research with comparative politics, and even bring new research topics to the academic communities.