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The world’s population is increasingly concentrated in cities. Research on urbanization’s implications for peace and security has been hampered by a lack of comparable data on political mobilization and violence at the city level across space and through time, however. Urban Social Disorder 3.0 is a detailed event dataset covering 186 national capitals and major urban centers from 1960 to 2014. It includes 12 types of nonviolent and violent events, detailing the actors involved and their targets, start and end dates of each event, and the number of participants and deaths. We provide an overview of the main features of these data, and trends in urban social disorder across space and time. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by analyzing the relationship between city size and the frequency of lethal disorder events. We find a positive relationship between city population and lethal urban social disorder, unlike previous studies. These new data raise promising avenues for future research on democratization; climate change and food security; and spillovers between different forms of mobilization and violence.

Globale helsespørsmål har mange berøringspunkter med internasjonal fred og sikkerhet, men har blitt viet relativt lite oppmerksomhet i diskusjoner i FNs sikkerhetsråd. Denne artikkelen gir en oversikt over kunnskapsgrunnlaget for sammenhengen mellom helse og internasjonal fred og sikkerhet, og belyser fire hovedgrupper av årsakssammenhenger. For det første kan uhelse føre til væpnet konflikt. For det andre kan helsekriser bidra til å svekke beredskapen mot konflikt. For det tredje kan helseintervensjoner bidra til å stabilisere sårbare samfunn i kjølvannet av konflikt. For det fjerde gjør konflikt det vanskelig å løse helsekriser. Alle disse berører også direkte eller indirekte Norges fire hovedprioriteter som valgt medlem i FNs sikkerhetsråd for perioden 2021–2022. Gjennomgangen av disse fire årsakssammenhengene demonstrerer at globale helsespørsmål på flere områder er klart relevante for global sikkerhet.

Armed conflicts are a concern for human development and public health, and represent a major impediment for realizing Sustainable Development Goal #3: to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Vaccination programs can be highly politicized and subjected to major security constraints in war zones, reducing their effectiveness. This article studies how armed conflict impacts immunization rates among children, combining two large datasets. We use health data for 15 conflict-affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including multiple Demographic and Health Survey rounds for most. We exploit the fact that age-appropriate vaccinations should take place in the child’s first year of life, and compare children aged one to five with varying degrees of (local) conflict exposure in their first year of life within the same countries and communities. We differentiate between the effects of local and country-level exposure to conflict on childhood immunization rates. The regression results show that conflict has a nonmonotonic effect on vaccination rates with minor (major) conflicts being associated with higher (lower) full immunization rates. We argue that in the case of minor conflicts, local-level health care access drives the results, whereas for major conflicts it is mainly national channels that drive the result.

This academic thought piece provides an overview of the history of, and current trends in, publishing practices in the scientific fields known to the authors (chemical sciences, social sciences and humanities), as well as a discussion of how open access mandates such as Plan S from cOAlition S will affect these practices. It begins by summarizing the evolution of scientific publishing, in particular how it was shaped by the learned societies, and highlights how important quality assurance and scientific management mechanisms are being challenged by the recent introduction of ever more stringent open access mandates. The authors then discuss the various reactions of the researcher community to the introduction of Plan S, and elucidate a number of concerns: that it will push researchers towards a pay-to-publish system which will inevitably create new divisions between those who can afford to get their research published and those who cannot; that it will disrupt collaboration between researchers on the different sides of cOAlition S funding; and that it will have an impact on academic freedom of research and publishing. The authors analyse the dissemination of, and responses to, an open letter distributed and signed in reaction to the introduction of Plan S, before concluding with some thoughts on the potential for evolution of open access in scientific publishing.

Violent crime in Mexico occurs at a rate that dwarfs the human costs of most contemporary civil wars, and the drug cartels responsible for the violence exercise de facto control over significant geographical territories. In this respect, the Mexican “drug wars” resemble conflicts over the control of rich natural resources in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, blurring the distinction between “political” and “social” or “criminal” violence. In the civil war literature, a young age structure has been argued to provide inexpensive rebel labor and thus increase opportunities for a rebel group to wage war against a government. Similarly, relatively large groups of “idle” young men could arguably be a factor that reduces recruitment costs for criminal enterprises through the abundant supply of youth with low opportunity cost. Acknowledging organized crime around drug trafficking as a major cause of crime and violence in Mexico, we ask whether the availability of large young male cohorts, or male “youth bulges”, low education and high youth unemployment ease the recruitment to these organizations and may contribute to explain variance in violent crime rates across Mexican states over time. Using panel data covering 32 states in Mexico during the 1997–2010 period, we find that, while a coarse measure of regional youth bulges is not associated with patterns of violent youth crime, high youth unemployment in low-education strata is, in particular in the context of large male youth bulges. These results remain robust against alternative data, sample size, estimation techniques and controls for potential endogeneity concerns.

Most research on the security implications of environmental and demographic change does not explicitly distinguish between urban and rural areas. While statistical conflict analyses are increasingly sophisticated with respect to spatial and substantive disaggregation they largely ignore the possibility that urban and rural areas may be affected differently. In Africa, a continent assumed to be particularly vulnerable to the social and economic externalities of environmental and demographic change, less than one percent of the land mass is defined as ‘urban’. Yet, the population that lives in African cities is expected to increase by more than 150% between 2020 and 2050 according to UN population forecasts, massively outpacing rural population growth estimated at 35%. Given the vast social transformation associated with this process of rapid urbanization, understanding the dynamics and consequences of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its possible relationship with environmental factors is key to reducing vulnerabilities and facilitating sustainable urban growth on the continent. In this article we argue that high urban population growth may strain the provision of public services in urban areas, heighten competition over scarce urban land, and increase the chances of urban social unrest. We expect population pressure to have the most profound effects on social unrest in peri-urban areas, meaning the urban outskirts. We further investigate whether environmental push factors, operationalized as droughts happening in rural areas proximate to the urban centers, could be driving any effect of urban population growth on social disorder, possibly supporting concerns over climate change-induced social unrest. We test our expectations on a sample of similarly sized urban and peri-urban ‘grid cells’ covering the whole of the African continent for the 1997–2010 period, using geo-coded social unrest data. Our analysis shows that urban population growth is associated with increased unrest in the peri-urban areas only. We find no evidence, however, that this relationship is driven by environmental push factors in the form of nearby droughts. The study contributes insights relevant to the broader debates about possible security implications of hyper-urbanization and climate change.

Water charities and the UN development goals consider access to clean water and sanitation as transformative: improving personal dignity, quality of life and economic opportunities for individuals and the economic resilience of communities to climate stress. Can the provision of services also mitigate the conflict potential arising from climate change? If so, how broad must access be to become effective? We test how household access to improved water, sanitation, and electricity affects the probability of local conflict in nine drought-prone African countries. We use annual PRIO-GRID cells as the unit of analysis and model the probability of a grid-cell experiencing fatal armed conflict during local or proximate drought conditions. DHS data are used to calculate the percentage of households with access to specific services. We show that even relatively modest investments in reliable sanitation and water infrastructures enhance communities’ ability to avoid getting drawn into violent conflict in response to rainfall shocks.

Does more education lead to less political violence, and may education thus be a tool for peace? This article provides the first systematic review of the existing quantitative literature on education and political violence. Looking at arguments pertaining to levels, expansion, inequality, and content of education, we identify 42 quantitative studies from the time period 1996 to 2016 that test the relationship between various measures of education and political violence. An emerging scholarly consensus seems to be that education has a general pacifying effect. However, this general conclusion is challenged by recent evidence showing above-average levels of education among terrorists and genocide perpetrators. This, as well as other findings, underscore that the relationship between education and political violence is complex and multidimensional, depending on type of political violence, mediating factors, and level of analysis. We conclude with policy implications from our findings and discuss directions for future analysis.

While there is a vast literature studying the effects of official development aid (ODA) on economic growth, there are far fewer comparative studies addressing how aid affects health outcomes. Furthermore, while much attention has been paid to country-level effects of aid, there is a clear knowledge gap in the literature when it comes to systematic studies of aid effectiveness below the country-level. Addressing this gap, we undertake what we believe is the first systematic attempt to study how ODA affects infant mortality at the subnational level. We match new geographic aid data from the AidData on the precise location, type, and time frame of bilateral and multilateral aid projects in Nigeria with available georeferenced survey data from five Nigerian Demographic and Health Surveys. Using quasi-experimental approaches, with mother fixed-effects, we are able to control for a vast number of unobserved factors that may otherwise be spuriously correlated with both infant mortality and ODA. The results indicate very clearly that geographical proximity to active aid projects reduces infant mortality. Moreover, aid contributes to reduce systematic inter-group, or horizontal, inequalities in a setting where such differences loom large. In particular, we find that aid more effectively reduces infant mortality in less privileged groups like children of Muslim women, and children living in rural, and in Muslim-dominated areas. Finally, there is evidence that aid projects are established in areas that on average have lower infant mortality than non-aid locations, suggesting that there are biases resulting in aid not necessarily reaching those populations in greatest need.

Public health emergencies like major epidemics in countries with already poor health infrastructure have the potential to set back efforts to reduce maternal deaths globally. The 2014 Ebola crisis in Liberia is claimed to have caused major disruptions to a health system not fully recovered after the country’s civil war, and is an important and relevant case for studying the resilience of health systems during crises. We use data on the utilization of maternal health care services from two representative surveys, one conducted before the outbreak of Ebola, the 2013 Liberian DHS, and another, smaller survey conducted in Monrovia in December 2014, during the height of the epidemic. We focus exclusively on data for women aged 18–49 residing in urban Monrovia, restricting our samples to 1,073 and 763 respondents from the two surveys respectively. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining a multinomial logit model with in-depth semi-structured interviews. Our regression analyses indicate that deliveries in public facilities declined whereas they increased for private facilities. Furthermore, overall facility delivery rates remained stable through the Ebola epidemic: the proportion of home births did not increase. Drawing on insights from extensive qualitative interviews with medical personnel and focus groups with community members conducted in Monrovia in August–September 2015 we attribute these survey findings to a supply side “substitution effect” whereby private clinics provided an important cushion to the shock leading to lower supply of government services. Furthermore, our interviews suggest that government health care workers continued to work in private facilities in their local communities when public facilities were closed. Our findings indicate that resources to shore up healthcare institutions should be directed toward interventions that support private facilities and health personnel working privately in communities during times of crisis so that these facilities are safe alternatives for women during crisis.

Objectives: Many conflict-affected countries are faced with an acute shortage of health care providers, including skilled birth attendants. As such, during conflicts traditional birth attendants have become the first point of call for many pregnant women, assisting them during pregnancy, labour and birth, and in the postpartum period. This study seeks to explore how the role of traditional birth attendants in maternal health, especially childbirth, has evolved in two post-conflict settings in sub-Saharan Africa (Burundi and northern Uganda) spanning the period of active warfare to the post-conflict era. Methods: A total of 63 individual semi-structured in-depth interviews and 8 focus group discussions were held with women of reproductive age, local health care providers and staff of non-governmental organisations working in the domain of maternal health who experienced the conflict, across urban, semi-urban and rural settings in Burundi and northern Uganda. Discussions focused on the role played by traditional birth attendants in maternal health, especially childbirth during the conflict and how the role has evolved in the post-conflict era. Transcripts from the interviews and focus group discussions were analysed by thematic analysis (framework approach). Results: Traditional birth attendants played a major role in childbirth-related activities in both Burundi and northern Uganda during the conflict, with some receiving training and delivery kits from the local health systems and non-governmental organisations to undertake deliveries. Following the end of the conflict, traditional birth attendants have been prohibited by the government from undertaking deliveries in both Burundi and northern Uganda. In Burundi, the traditional birth attendants have been integrated within the primary health care system, especially in rural areas, and re-assigned the role of ‘birth companions’. In this capacity they undertake maternal health promotion activities within their communities. In northern Uganda, on the other hand, traditional birth attendants have not been integrated within the local health system and still appear to undertake clandestine deliveries in some rural areas. Conclusion: The prominent role of traditional birth attendants in childbirth during the conflicts in Burundi and northern Uganda has been dwindling in the post-conflict era. Traditional birth attendants can still play an important role in facilitating facility and skilled attended births if appropriately integrated with the local health system.

Investigation of whether, how, and why inequality influences the dynamics of violent conflict has a long intellectual history. Inequality between individuals and households (vertical inequality) has dominated the literature, but recently attention has shifted to the role of group-based inequalities in triggering violence. Our review of research on the relationship between conflict mobilisation and violence, and “horizontal inequality” (inequalities based on group identities such as ethnicity, region, and religion) reveals solid support for the argument that high levels of horizontal economic and political inequalities among the relatively deprived make violent conflict more likely.

The conditions under which a mother gives birth greatly affect the health risk of both the mother and the child. This article addresses how local exposure to organized violence affects whether women give birth in a health facility. We combine geocoded data on violent events from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program with georeferenced survey data on the use of maternal health care services from the Demographic and Health Surveys. Our sample covers 569,201 births by 390,574 mothers in 31 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We use a mother fixed-effects analysis to estimate the effect of recent organized violence events within a radius of 50 km of the home of each mother on the likelihood that her child is born in a health facility. The results indicate that geographical and temporal proximity to organized violence significantly reduces the likelihood of institutional births. Although the level of maternal health care overall is lower in rural areas, the negative effect of violence appears to be stronger in urban areas. The study further underscores the importance of household and individual resilience, indicating that the effect of organized violence on institutional child delivery is greater among poor and less-educated mothers. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13524-018-0685-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A strong fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africaf could pave the way for a demographic transition on the continent that would open a demographic window of opportunity. However, it has been suggested that the demographic transition and increasing relative youth proportions are neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in themselves, and that under unfavorable political and economic conditions, ‘youth bulges’ may be a curse rather than a blessing, increasing the risk of armed conflict. We show that the demographic transition seems to come later in African conflict countries south of the Sahara than to those who have not experienced conflict. This chapter will explore these two scenarios, and how different factors, such as education, fertility and health, ethnic distribution, migration and, urbanization, can affect the ways in which demographic change impacts the risk of conflict.

Can states reduce the risk of violent political conflict by simply refusing to collect or publish data on their ethnic makeup and change? This study addresses a neglected aspect of the ethnic conflict literature and provides the first systematic empirical study of the significance of recording ethnic affiliation in censuses for the risk of armed conflict. A general empirical regularity noted in the ethnic heterogeneity and civil war literature is that ethnicity is associated with a somewhat higher risk of conflict in bipolar societies. However, few quantitative studies focus on how changes in the relative strength of groups may affect the risk of civil war. Some recent literature indicates that differential growth may destabilize heterogeneous democracies internally. In democratic societies, political power is distributed according to popular support in elections. A changing balance between groups may thus alter the distribution of power in regimes where ethnic, linguistic or religious divisions to a certain extent determine voting behavior, and this may potentially lead to political instability and ultimately civil conflict. We argue that the relationship between differential growth and instability and violence may be even more important in semidemocracies with electoral systems, but with weak and inconsistent political institutions. We start from the premise that, for differential growth to become a potential driver of instability and violent conflict, information about such change has to be recorded with a national census and actually published. In a cross-national time-series study we investigate whether countries publishing identity data from censuses are at a greater risk of experiencing low-intensity armed conflict. We find that the effect of publishing data on group size is indeed mediated through political institutions. In countries with stable institutions, publication of population identity data is associated with a lower risk of conflict, whereas unstable institutional arrangements are associated with an increase conflict risk when publishing such data.

Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research ( JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored by long-time editor Nils Petter Gleditsch offers a historical view on peace research and tracks trends in the use of ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ in titles of JPR across the first 49 volumes of the journal. Opening the review article section, two contributions address key thematic areas for the journal. Few if any subjects have attracted more attention in the study of international relations during the second half of JPR’s first 50 years than the democratic peace, and in the extension of this subject, the broader debate about the liberal peace. Additional articles review the status and propose future developments in the study of war and its relationship with territory, ethnicity, ideology and natural resources. Another key historical topic associated with the journal concerns the economic cost of military conflict, while more recent research fields covered include terrorism and human rights, topics that have grown to become major JPR niches. Reflecting the methodological contributions by JPR, two articles focus on challenges of contemporary quantitative political analysis and progress in peace and conflict data collection. Finally, this special issue includes a review of research on international mediation in armed conflicts.

Recent studies have found significant excess mortality in women during and immediately after armed conflicts. This article directly assesses one of the most likely explanations, namely that war neg...

For the first time in history, the majority of the world population now lives in cities. Global urbanization will continue at high speed; the world's urban population is projected to increase by more than 3 billion people between 2010 and 2050. Some of this increase will be the result of high urban fertility rates and reclassification of rural land into urban areas, but a significant portion of future urbanization will be caused by rural-to-urban migration. This migration is expected to be particularly prevalent in countries and regions most affected by the changing climate. While urban populations generally enjoy a higher quality of life, many cities in the developing world have large slums with populations that are largely excluded from access to resources, jobs, and public services. In the environmental security literature, great rural resource scarcity, causing rural to urban migration, is seen as an important source of violent conflict. This study investigates how population growth affects patterns of public unrest in urban centers within the context of crucial intervening factors like democracy, poverty, economic shocks. It utilizes a newly collected event dataset of urban social disturbance covering 55 major cities in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa since 1960. The empirical analysis provides little support for the notion that high and increasing urban population pressure leads to a higher risk or frequency of social disorder. Instead, we find that urban disorder is primarily associated with a lack of consistent political institutions, economic shocks, and ongoing civil conflict.

Despite global efforts to expand educational opportunities for women, gender inequalities persist in many developing countries. Addressing the root causes of gender inequalities in secondary education we ask whether such disparities persist because of low state capacity or low willingness. Based on gender- and age-specific educational attainment data for 57 developing countries in 1970–2010, our analysis indicates that willingness factors are central to understanding gender equality in education: ethnically heterogeneous countries and countries where Islam is the primary religion experience lower levels of equality. However, key capacity factors like a country’s income level are unrelated to gender differences in education.

By 2050, two thirds of the world's population will live in cities, and the greatest growth in urban populations will take place in the least developed countries. This presents many governments with...

Sisk, Timothy D, 2009.International Mediation in Civil Wars:Bargaining with Bullets. London: Routledge. xiþ253 pp.ISBN 9780415477055

The Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award is a triennial prize to honour scholars, who have made exemplary contributions to the scientific study of militarised conflict. This essay presents the third winner of the award – Nils Petter Gleditsch – and commemorates on his scholarly achievements over the last four decades.

Recent cross-national studies have found only moderate support for the idea that population pressure and resource scarcity may lead to political violence, contrary to much of the case study literature in the field. This article suggests that the level of analysis may be at the heart of this discrepancy. In a time-series study of political violence in 27 Indian states for the 1956–2002 period, it is tested whether high population pressure on renewable natural resources, youth bulges, and differential growth rates between religious groups are associated with higher levels of armed conflict, political violent events, and Hindu-Muslim riots. The results are generally more supportive of the resource scarcity and conflict scenario than recent global studies. The article further suggests that youth bulges affect all three forms of violence and that differential growth rates are positively related to armed conflict.

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves an even higher degree of uncertainty. The direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land. We argue that our best guess about the future has to be based on our knowledge about the relationship between demography, environment and violent conflict in the past. Previous rigorous studies in the field have mostly focused on national-level aggregates. This article represents a new approach to assess the impact of environment on internal armed conflict by using georeferenced (GIS) data and small geographical, rather than political, units of analysis. It addresses some of the most important factors assumed to be strongly influenced by global warming: land degradation, freshwater availability, and population density and change. While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant. The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: To identify, synthesise and evaluate the effects of health system and other interventions aimed at improving maternal, newborn and women's reproductive health in crisis settings.

Background Armed conflict has been described as an important contributor to the social determinants of health and a driver of health inequity, including maternal health. These conflicts may severely reduce access to maternal health services and, as a consequence, lead to poor maternal health outcomes for a period extending beyond the conflict itself. As such, understanding how maternal health-seeking behaviour and utilisation of maternal health services can be improved in post-conflict societies is of crucial importance. This study aims to explore the determinants (barriers and facilitators) of women’s uptake of maternal, sexual and reproductive health services (MSRHS) in two post-conflict settings in sub-Saharan Africa; Burundi and Northern Uganda, and how uptake is affected by exposure to armed conflict. Methods This is a qualitative study that utilised in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs) for data collection. One hundred and fifteen participants took part in the interviews and FGDs across the two study settings. Participants were women of reproductive age, local health providers and staff of non-governmental organizations. Issues explored included the factors affecting women’s utilisation of a range of MSRHS vis-à-vis conflict exposure. The framework method, making use of both inductive and deductive approaches, was used for analyzing the data. Results A complex and inter-related set of factors affect women’s utilisation of MSRHS in post-conflict settings. Exposure to armed conflict affects women’s utilisation of these services mainly through impeding women’s health seeking behaviour and community perception of health services. The factors identified cut across the individual, socio-cultural, and political and health system spheres, and the main determinants include women’s fear of developing pregnancy-related complications, status of women empowerment and support at the household and community levels, removal of user-fees, proximity to the health facility, and attitude of health providers. Conclusions Improving women’s uptake of MSRHS in post-conflict settings requires health system strengthening initiatives that address the barriers across the individual, socio-cultural, and political and health system spheres. While addressing financial barriers to access is crucial, attention should be paid to non-financial barriers as well. The goal should be to develop an equitable and sustainable health system.

Background Armed conflict potentially poses serious challenges to access and quality of maternal and reproductive health (MRH) services, resulting in increased maternal morbidity and mortality. The effects of armed conflict may vary from one setting to another, including the mechanisms/channels through which the conflict may lead to poor access to and quality of health services. This study aims to explore the effects of armed conflict on MRH in Burundi and Northern Uganda. Methods This is a descriptive qualitative study that used in-depth interviews (IDIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs) with women, health providers and staff of NGOs for data collection. Issues discussed include the effects of armed conflict on access and quality of MRH services and outcomes, and the mechanisms through which armed conflict leads to poor access and quality of MRH services. A total of 63 IDIs and 8 FGDs were conducted involving 115 participants. Results The main themes that emerged from the study were: armed conflict as a cause of limited access to and poor quality of MRH services; armed conflict as a cause of poor MRH outcomes; and armed conflict as a route to improved access to health care. The main mechanisms through which the conflict led to poor access and quality of MRH services varied across the sites: attacks on health facilities and looting of medical supplies in both sites; targeted killing of health personnel and favouritism in the provision of healthcare in Burundi; and abduction of health providers in Northern Uganda. The perceived effects of the conflict on MRH outcomes included: increased maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality; high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and SGBV; increased levels of prostitution, teenage pregnancy and clandestine abortion; and high fertility levels. Relocation to government recognised IDP camps was perceived to improve access to health services. Conclusions The effects of armed conflict on MRH services and outcomes are substantial. The mechanisms through which armed conflict leads to poor access and quality of MRH services vary from one setting to another. All these issues need to be considered in the design and implementation of interventions to improve MRH in these settings.

It has frequently been suggested that exceptionally large youth cohorts, the so-called “youth bulges,” make countries more susceptible to political violence. Within two prominent theoretical frameworks in the study of civil war, youth bulges are argued to potentially increase both opportunities and motives for political violence. This claim is empirically tested in a time-series cross-national statistical model for internal armed conflict for the period 1950–2000, and for event data for terrorism and rioting for the years 1984–1995. The expectation that youth bulges should increase the risk of political violence receives robust support for all three forms of violence. The results are consistent both with an expectation that youth bulges provide greater opportunities for violence through the abundant supply of youths with low opportunity costs, and with an expectation that stronger motives for violence may arise as youth bulges are more likely to experience institutional crowding, in particular unemployment. Some contextual factors have been suggested to potentially enhance the effect of youth bulges. In an empirical test of these propositions, the study suggests that youth bulges are particularly associated with an increasing risk of internal armed conflict in starkly autocratic regimes, but a similar effect is also found for highly democratic countries. The interaction of youth bulges with economic decline and expansion in higher education appear to increase the risk of terrorism but not of rioting. Recent studies in economic demography find that when fertility is sharply decreasing, causing lower dependency ratios, large youth cohorts entering the labor market may lead to economic boosts. This study finds some empirical evidence complementing these results, indicating that the effect of youth bulges on political violence may decline along with reduced dependency ratios.

The demography of armed conflict is an emerging field among demographers and peace researchers alike. The articles in this special issue treat demography as both a cause and a consequence of armed conflict, and they carry important policy implications. A study of German-allied countries during World War II addresses the role of refugees and territorial loss in paving the way for genocide. Other articles focusing on the demographic causes of conflict discuss highly contentious issues of whether economic and social inequality, high population pressure on natural resources, and youth bulges and limited migration opportunities can lead to different forms of armed conflict and state failure. The articles on demographic responses to armed conflict analyze the destructiveness of pre-industrial warfare, differences in short- and long-term mortality trends after armed conflict, and migratory responses in war. Another set of articles on demographic responses to war is published simultaneously in the European Journal of Population.

Demographic and environmental factors have claimed a dominant position in the post-Cold War security discourse. According to the neo-Malthusian conflict scenario, population pressure on natural renewable resources makes societies more prone to low-intensity civil war. On the contrary, resource-optimists concede that agricultural land scarcity caused by high population density may be a driving factor behind economic development, thus causing peace in a long-term perspective. These notions are tested in a quantitative cross-national time-series study covering the 1950-2000 period. The results do not provide strong support for either perspective. Countries experiencing high rates of population growth, high rates of urbanization, or large refugee populations do not face greater risks of internal armed conflict. There is some indication that scarcity of potential cropland may have a pacifying effect. However, where land scarcity combines with high rates of population growth, the risk of armed conflict increases somewhat. This trend is particularly marked for the 1970s, the decade that saw the great rise in neo-Malthusian concerns. Claims that the world has entered a ‘new age of insecurity’ after the end of the Cold War, where demographic and environmental factors threaten security and state stability, appear to be unfounded. Overall, the robustness of the empirical support for both paradigms is low. A strong emphasis on security as a macro rationale for reducing global population growth thus seems unwarranted.

The takeover of the UN ‘safearea’ of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces inJuly 1995 was followed by the killing of alarge number of male Bosnian Muslim civilians,in what has been characterized as the worstmassacre in Europe since World War II. Thisarticle is based on a report submitted asevidence to the UN International CriminalTribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) inthe case against General Radislav Krstic,who became the first person to be convicted ofgenocide at this Tribunal. This case also formspart of the genocide charges against SlobodanMilosevic, Radovan Karadžic and RatkoMladic. To our knowledge, this report isunique among genocide studies in its approach,using individual-level data to identify everyvictim in order to arrive at a highly reliableminimum estimate of the number of peoplekilled. This was possible because of efforts byhumanitarian organizations to register peoplewho disappeared during the war as well as theavailability of both pre- and post-conflictdata on individuals. We conclude that at least7,475 persons were killed after the fall ofSrebrenica. We also present estimates of theprobability of being a victim: more than 33%for Muslim men who were enumerated inSrebrenica in 1991.