Richard P. Cincotta and Robert Engelman write an interesting article on how young men in a society drive conflict. The solution to conflict? Encourage family planning and smaller families.
It would help if governments – especially the U.S. government – began to think of investments in international family planning and AIDS prevention not as political footballs but as prudent strategies to help make the 21st century safer for all than the last century proved to be.
On the streets of Iraq, the faces of insurgents targeting U.S. soldiers and Iraqi policemen are young and male. From Haiti to the scattered hideouts of Al Qaeda, from Afghanistan to the occupied Palestinian territories, the age demographic of rebellion and terror is remarkably similar. Young men – out of school, out of work and charged with hatred – are the lifeblood of deadly conflict.
Countries with a high proportion of adults under 30 have two and a half times the probability of experiencing a new outbreak of civil conflict as those with more mature age structures, according to a comparison by Population Action International of data spanning the past few decades. Other demographic stresses – rapid rates of urban population growth and very low levels of cropland or freshwater resources relative to population size – also appear to add to a country’s risk of civil conflict. In some countries a high rate of AIDS deaths among adults in the work force and in military forces is leaving behind an unprecedentedly youthful population, which can undermine political stability and increase vulnerability to internal conflict.
Population trends alone are unlikely triggers for political violence. Yet the strong correlations we found support a body of research suggesting that specific population dynamics do add risk that new conflicts will emerge in some countries.
A U.S. government-sponsored research team, the State Failure Task Force, identified infant mortality as the most consistent predictor of political collapse and social unrest. Other researchers have shown that countries with large proportions of young people are inordinately vulnerable to political and civil disorder and the rise of militarism. What is new is the realization that these seemingly disparate factors are two parts of a single story, a process that social scientists call demographic transition.
This transition is the shift in any population from large families and short lives to small families and long lives. Every country is going through or has effectively completed this transition. (Compare your own family size to those of your great-grandparents.)
As the demographic transition proceeds, infant and child deaths become rarities, more couples use modern contraception and have fewer children, more families can afford to keep their children in school, women have more time for activities outside the home, population growth slows, older people make up higher proportions of total population and urban growth eases. Governments gain time to expand infrastructure, meet the demand for services and conserve dwindling natural resources such as family-farmed cropland.
During the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, most countries that experienced a new outbreak of civil conflict were still in the early and middle stages of the demographic transition. Those developing countries that experienced substantial declines in birth and death rates during that period, however, proved less likely to sustain a new outbreak of deadly internal strife. And while it appeared that declining birth and childhood death rates had little, if any, influence on ongoing warfare from the 1970s to the 1990s, the risk of a new conflict declined steadily and consistently in societies moving rapidly toward longer life expectancies and two-child families.
The demographic connection to conflict offers a ray of hope in a time of need. Rates of both birth and death continue to fall in most developing countries. One in three countries has essentially completed the demographic transition. But about 1.5 billion people in another third of all countries remain in the transition’s early or middle phases, with family size averaging 3.5 children or more. These countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and scattered across Central America and the Andean region.
Progress through the demographic transition in these countries means future generations may know a more peaceful and politically stable world. Continued progress is fragile, however, and will require public funding and political will for good health care, education and improvements in the status of women.
It would help if governments – especially the U.S. government – began to think of investments in international family planning and AIDS prevention not as political footballs but as prudent strategies to help make the 21st century safer for all than the last century proved to be.
Richard P. Cincotta is a senior research associate and Robert Engelman is vice president of research at Population Action International. They are co-authors of a recently released report, “The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War.” Demographics of discord