What Is the Security Demographic?
The term employed as the title of this report — the security demographic — embodies a set of stability-promoting demographic characteristics that typify populations near the end of their demographic transition. Over the past two decades, some 20 developing countries have taken on these features by attaining low birth and death rates. Most have done so by pursuing policies and supporting programs that increased their citizens’ access to primary — and specifically to reproductive — health care, and to education.Why should analysts and security policymakers interest themselves in policies
and programs that alter demographic outcomes? The evidence presented in this
report suggests strongly that helping countries approach the final phase of
demographic transition — a phase in which people live long lives and families
are typically small, healthy and educated, where population age structure is
mature and population growth is nearly at its end — promises ultimately to
reduce the frequency of civil conflicts and to help bring about a more peaceful
world.
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| The likelihood of experiencing an outbreak of civil conflict in the 1990s was highest for countries in the early and middle phases of demographic transition. Each point represents a country, in terms of its birth and death rate (measured as the number of events per 1,000 people), 1985 – 1990. The curved line traces the general path of countries as they proceeded along the demographic transition during the late 1980s, at the close of the Cold War. During the next decade, most countries in civil conflict were situated left of the curve’s trough. Few countries to the right, in the vicinity of population equilibrium (diagonal dotted line), experienced an outbreak of civil conflict. |
