Key Findings

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

On average, the decline in the annual birth rate of five births per thousand people corresponded to a decline of about 5 percent in the likelihood of civil conflict during the following decade — descending from more than 40 percent likelihood in the earliest phase of demographic transition to less than 5 percent in the latest. While this association does not suggest direct causation, the relationships found here are striking and consistent.

Demographic processes neither lead inevitably to, nor do they eliminate the risk of, civil conflict. Several demographically high-risk states may have offset some risk by facilitating emigration and encouraging remittances (savings sent home by emigrant workers), distributing farmland, creating urban employment, addressing ethnic grievances, or alternatively, by ruthlessly repressing dissent.

In a few countries where progress along the demographic transition should have helped alleviate risk — such as Colombia, Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) and Sri Lanka — costly civil conflicts that first emerged in earlier decades continued to be waged (although in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka this may be changing).

The demographic factors most closely associated with the likelihood of an outbreak of civil conflict during the 1990s were a high proportion of young adults (aged 15 to 29 years) — a phenomenon referred to as a youth bulge — and a rapid rate of urban population growth. Countries in which young adults comprised more than 40 percent of the adult population were more than twice as likely as countries with lower proportions to experience an outbreak of civil conflict. States with urban population growth rates above 4 percent were about twice as likely to sustain the outbreak of a civil conflict as countries with lower rates.

Countries with low-availability categories of cropland and/or renewable fresh water, measured on a per capita basis, were 1.5 times as likely to experience civil conflict as those in other categories. While water scarcity has gained attention in the past as a likely predisposing condition for interstate war and civil tensions between ethnic regions, land-related threats to traditional rural livelihoods, such as disputes over farmland distribution or settlement of outsiders into traditional ethnic homelands, have featured more prominently in the evolution of recent civil conflicts than tensions over
water.

Currently available data cannot verify that a high death rate among working-age adults, a characteristic of populations with high hiv prevalence, contributes to a state’s vulnerability to civil conflict. Nonetheless, the arguments for the connection — citing the loss of key professionals, the weakening of military units, and the unprecedented numbers of orphans — are strong, and the projected demographic impact of hiv/aids is likely to exceed by far that of the 1980s and 1990s.

Demographic factors do not act alone in producing stresses that can challenge government leadership and the functional capacity of states. Key demographic characteristics that increase the risk of civil conflict interact with each other and with non-demographic factors, such as historic ethnic tensions, unresponsive governance and ineffective institutions. This compounds the net risk for countries in the early or middle phases of demographic transition.

For the near future, the highest demographic risks of civil conflict are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East and in South Asia. An exercise of identifying countries with multiple risk factors, based on projected population data from 2000 to 2005, identifies 25 mostly African and Asian countries that have reached critical levels in the three principal demographic stress factors considered in this report (high proportion of youth, rapid urban growth, and exceptionally low levels of cropland and/or fresh water per person). Ten countries that had reached critical levels in these three factors also are experiencing excessive adult mortality, mostly due to high hiv prevalence —  an additional factor likely to exacerbate risk levels for civil conflict that are already dangerously
high.