Topic: Democracy

Arab Spring: High Food Prices an Unlikely Cause of Revolts

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Read “High Food Prices an Unlikely Cause for the Start of the Arab Spring” by Richard Cincotta, posted on the New Security Beat, April 2014.

Just months after popular uprisings toppled Tunisia and Egypt’s authoritarian regimes, a trio of complex-system researchers published a brief article linking these demonstrations with high levels of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s international Food Price Index. Marco Lagi, Karla Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam’s model, which predicts outbreaks of deadly social conflict when the index tops 210, has since become a popular explanation wielded by many for bouts of popular unrest, including the Arab Spring and overthrow of Ukraine’s government. But were food prices really an underlying “hidden” cause for the start of a wave of instability that is still being felt today?

Not everyone is convinced, least of all, international food policy analysts.

Read the rest of the essay here …. 

Israel: Ethno-religious Demography and the Future of Electoral Politics

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View “Government without the Ultra-Orthodox?: Demography and the Future of Israeli Politics” by Richard Cincotta, published in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s E-Notes, December 2013.

It would be hard to conjure up a more grave and immediate set of peacetime challenges than those that Israel faces—from the advances in Iran’s nuclear program, to the political instabilities that continue to play out along the length of its borders. Yet, the outcome of the January 2013 election of the 19th Knesset appears to have been shaped less by the Israeli public’s perceptions of foreign threats, and more by its domestic concerns.

This brief note raises two questions: How did Yesh Atid rise from a virtual standing start to claim a critical position in Israel’s 33rd government? And what does this party’s electoral achievement mean for the future of Israel’s democracy?

Download “Government Without the Ultra-Orthodox?” here … 

Putting Mali Back Together Again: An Age-Structural Perspective

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Read “Putting Mali Back Together Again: An Age Structural Perspective” by Richard Cincotta, posted on the New Security Beat, May 9, 2013.

Once considered a model for Sahelian democracy, Mali’s liberal regime (assessed as “free” in Freedom House’s annual survey of democratic governance continuously from 2000 to 2011) virtually disintegrated in March 2012 when a group of junior army officers, frustrated by the central government’s half-hearted response to a rebellion in the state’s vast northern tier, found themselves – somewhat accidently – in control of the state. With renewed elections in Mali slated for July and French troops containing Tuareg and Islamist insurgents, the Sahelian state appears to be on track to start again where it left off just over a year ago. However, several African and Western political commentators contend that putting Mali’s laudably democratic, yet habitually fragile and chronically ineffectual regime, back together again is simply a bad idea.

Download Putting Mali Back Together Again 

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 …