Topic: Middle East & North Africa (MENA)

Life Begins After 25: Demography and the Societal Timing of the Arab Spring

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Read “Life Begins after 25: Demography and the Societal Timing of the Arab Spring” by Richard Cincotta, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 2012.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Gregory Gausse recounts how regional specialists, like himself, overestimated the strength and cohesiveness of North Africa’s autocracies, as well as the depth of personal allegiances available to these authoritarians among their military’s highest ranks. Little, if any, mention has been made, however, of an article describing the relationship between demography and democracy (“How Democracies Grow Up”) that was printed on the pages of Foreign Policy in March of 2008—more than two-and-a-half years before pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets in Tunisia—nor of an article published by the Woodrow Wilson Center (“Half a Chance“), published in early 2009. In those essays, I describe a simple model driven by population age structure (the distribution of population by age) that can be used to statistically forecast democratization, with reasonable success.

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Israel: Unpromising Demography in a Promised Land

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Read the NIC occasional paper entitled, “Unpromising Demography in a Promised Land: The Growth of Dissonant Minorities and the Escalation of Demographic Politics in Israel,” written by Richard Cincotta and Eric Kaufmann (U. London) and published in 2010.

Israel’s demographic challenge is more complex and immediate than most Middle East analysts assume. Secular and religiously traditional Israeli Jews, both native-born and immigrant, upon whose Zionist hopes and political ideals Israel was founded and maintained, are experiencing a “demographic squeeze”–the rise of two dissonant ethnoreligious minorities: the Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox Jews), who typically harbor sympathies to the right; and Israeli Arabs, whose political sympathies lie largely to the left. With each passing year, Israeli Arabs and Haredim, both of whom express grievances with the Zionist political and sectarian order, assume a larger proportion of the country’s population.

Download the rest of this National Intelligence Council occasional paper “Israel: Unpromising Demography in a Promised Land” here …

Youthful Populations in the Middle East

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Read Demographics of the Arab World, a brief comment by Richard P. Cincotta, posted on The New Security Beat, March 31, 2010.

A recent radio interview on the “Demographics of the Arab World” (March 2010) should be a must listen for those in the World Bank, where discussions of the Arab youth bulge are largely off the table. The interview with Magda Abu-Fadil of the American University of Beirut and Bernard Haykel of Princeton University suggests that scholars of the Arab world are not so timid, as also evidenced by UNDP’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report.

However, during the interview with Abu-Fadil and Haykel, Worldfocus’ Martin Savidge falls victim to two significant misconceptions that are worth mentioning for their pervasiveness among political science and economics communities:

1. Savidge believes that countries tend to risk political violence when their percentage of young adults is above 35 percent. This is close, but not quite correct. It’s the proportion of young adults in the adult population—i.e., the working-age population, as opposed to the population in general—that indicates an risk of fractious politics. Children (those below the age of 14) should not be counted in this indicator, yet in much of the literature they mistakenly are.
2. Savidge believes that large numbers of youth are an economic “good deal.” Here, Abu-Fadil and Haykel set him straight, noting that a bulge among the young adult population produces a demographic bonus only when fertility has significantly declined; the childhood cohorts are small and the subject of increased investment; and the youth moving into adulthood are educated.

These conditions are not the case for much of the Middle East.They are, however, the case in Iran and Turkey (non-Arab states at the borders of the Arab World), and will soon be the case in the Maghreb as well. The UNDP’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report fails to highlight the rapid fertility declines that have occurred across the Maghreb, from Morocco to Libya. UN Population Division demographer Patrick Gerland does, however, note these declines in a Worldfocus text interview.

Big changes could occur along the edges of the Arab world in the coming decade. Fertility decline, more recently, has made its way to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, although they still need a champion for women’s rights. Turkey had Ataturk, Iran had Reza Shah, and Tunisia had Habib Bourguiba. It’s no accident that these countries were the first to experience fertility decline and age structural changes—their leaders laid the groundwork decades ago.

Can a leader, however, with that amount of political guts and conviction emerge from the Saudi royal family? I’m doubtful.

Richard Cincotta is demographer-in-residence at the H.L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC.

Iran’s Chinese Future

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Download “Iran’s Chinese Future“, a demographic comparison of two countries on similar political tracks, published by Foreign Policy in June 2009, following pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran’s cities.

The past few weeks’ images (June, 2009) of tens of thousands of brave, bold, and mostly youthful opposition supporters crowding Tehran’s boulevards have encouraged some onlookers to draw hopeful parallels to the protests that helped topple most of the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, from the late 1980s onward. But, from a demographer’s standpoint, Iran’s youthful population age structure (in other words, its distribution of residents by age) suggests a different analogy. Depressingly enough for the democracy protesters in Iran and those who stand with them around the world, a closer comparison may be with China’s youth bulge experience 20 years ago, including the social fractures that pervaded that generation’s political culture and the ruthless and ongoing response by conservative elements of Chinese leadership.

Read more by downloading “Iran’s Chinese Future” here …. 

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