Progress Daily

During the last three decades of the 20th century, demographic transition was associated with continuous declines in the vulnerability of countries to civil conflicts (ethnic wars, antigovernment insurgencies and terrorism resulting in multiple deaths).

Demographic transition is the change that countries go through when they progress from a population with short lives and large families to one in which people tend to live longer lives and raise small families. About 1/3 of the world’s countries have completed this transition. About another 1/3 of all countries, plus the northern states of India — in total, about 1.5 billion people — remain in the transition’s early or middle phases. Most are in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Others are scattered across southern Asia and Latin America.

During the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, countries in the late phases of demographic transition were less likely to experience new outbreaks of civil conflicts than those still in the transition’s early or middle phases. The likelihood of civil conflict steadily decreased for high-risk countries as they experienced overall declines in birth and death rates.

Because death rates typically decrease before birth rates begin to decline, population tends to grow rapidly during the transition.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, a decline in a country’s annual birth rate of 10 births per thousand people corresponded to a decrease of about 10% in the likelihood of an outbreak of civil conflict. Each decade, countries in the earliest phase of demographic transition (with birth rates above 45 per thousand) had more than a 40% probability of experiencing a new outbreak of civil conflict. This vulnerability descended until the latest phase of transition, in which countries had less than a 5% probability of an outbreak of civil conflict.

The demographic factors most closely associated with the likelihood of a new outbreak of civil conflict during the 1990s were a high proportion of young adults (aged 15 to 29 years) and a rapid rate of urban population growth.

When coupled with a large youth bulge, countries with a very low availability of cropland and/or renewable fresh water (measured on a per capita basis) plus a rapid rate of urban population growth had a roughly 40% probability of experiencing an outbreak of civil conflict.

Most of the world’s countries are moving toward a range of population structures and dynamics that make civil conflict less likely. Progress through the demographic transition gives countries a more mature and less volatile age structure, slower workforce growth and a more slowly growing school-age population. It reduces urban growth, and gives countries additional time to expand infrastructure, meet the demand for services and conserve dwindling natural resources.

Over the past 40 years, the demographic transition has been moving forward impressively in nearly all of the world’s regions. Human population worldwide is growing at nearly half the pace of 35 years ago, and infant mortality and family size are roughly half of what they were at that time.

The material in this factsheet is based on the PAI publication, “The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War.”

“FactSheet: How Demographic Transition Reduces Countries’ Vulnerability to Civil Conflict,” Population Action International

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Demographics, Peace, Mechanization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.