Prelude – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Countries with a “youth bulge” in the population, are frequently cited as hotspots of social unrest, war and terrorism. Historians link youth bulges in populations to genocides, 20th-century fascism, revolutions (from France to Iran), and ongoing conflicts such as that in Darfur. Youth bulge theory is influential on U.S. foreign policy. Yet major changes are coming over the next twenty years. Check out this map:

Curzon note: Russia should also be in the dark blue category along with the EU and Japan, but its people don’t live long enough.

Countries with youthful age structures and rapidly growing populations form a crescent stretching from the Andean region of Latin America across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the Caucasus, and then through the northern parts of South Asia. But by 2025, the number of countries in this “arc of instability” will have decreased by 35 to 40 percent owing to declining fertility and maturing populations. Three quarters of the three dozen “youth bulge countries” projected to linger beyond 2025 will be located in Sub-Saharan Africa. The remainder will be located in the Middle East and scattered across Asia and among the Pacific Islands.

The emergence of new economic tigers by 2025 could occur where youth bulges mature into “worker bulges.” Experts argue that this demographic bonus is most advantageous when the country provides an educated work force and a businessfriendly environment for investment. Potential beneficiaries: Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Meanwhile, current youth bulge states of Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen will remain on rapid-growth trajectories. Tentative conclusions? These countries will remain chaotic, poorly governed, with poor economies not based on steady or stable production.

The wild card in these populations forecasts is HIV/AIDS. Neither an effective HIV vaccine nor a selfadministered microbicide, even if developed and tested before 2025, will likely be widely disseminated. It will remain a pandemic through 2025, with its epicenter in Sub-Saharan Africa. Life-extending antiretroviral therapies may be available, but AIDS remains a factor that could suppress the population of countries that otherwise look to have young and expanding populations.

Gap Shrinkage?

To briefly channel the spirit of Dr. Barnett, check out the map circa 2005, overlapped with the borders of what Dr. Barnett calls the “gap.” Here we see a strong correlation to the unstable, anarchic countries of the Gap and countries with young populations.

There is a strong correlation between the red and pink “youth bulge” states and the so-called Gap states. But what about going forward? Looking at 2025, this is what happens when we remove from the gap the states that go down one notch in color.

Naturally, age isn’t the only factor that defines the gap. Bolivia drops from red to pink while Peru stays pink, and under the simple classification that means Bolivia falls off the Gap while Peru remains the same. There’s no real reason to think this, so this new clarification is somewhat strange, but nonetheless, the correlation is real. And the changes we see in the map of the world over the next 20 years tells us something. We can make general expectations for improvement in India, Indonesia, northern Africa, but expect little change in Subsaharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Papua New Guinea.