(1) The Middle East is getting older - by Noah Smith - 0 views
-
I noticed something interesting about the Israel-Gaza war that seems to have generally been overlooked: The war hasn’t shown much sign of spreading throughout the Middle East.
-
The “Arab street” that everyone feared back in the early 2000s has certainly had protests in support of the Palestinians, but they’ve been very peaceful. Saudi Arabia has said that it still wants to normalize relations with Israel, conditional on a ceasefire.
-
it’s far from the dire expectations that everyone was throwing around in the first few days of the war. In 2011, the Arab Spring spread like wildfire, igniting huge, lengthy, bloody wars in Syria and Yemen, as well as various smaller wars throughout the Middle East; the Israel-Gaza war shows no sign of repeating this history.
- ...18 more annotations...
-
it’s also possible that population aging has something to do with it. There’s a pretty well-established literature linking youthful population bulges to elevated risk of conflict.
-
For example, Cincotta and Weber (2021) find that countries with a median age of 25 or less are much more likely to have revolutions:
-
Evidence from the 1990s reveals that countries where people aged fifteen to twenty-nine made up more than 40 percent of the adult population were twice as likely to suffer civil conflict.
-
Data collected from 1950 to 2000 found that countries where 35 percent or more of their adult populations comprised people aged fifteen to twenty-four were 150 percent more likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict
-
, the young people crowd each other out, and this makes them mad. This effect is obviously exacerbated when the economy is stagnating. Also, simply having a lot of young men around without much to lose seems like a risk factor in and of itself.
-
Whether rich or poor, the countries in the Greater Middle East — I’ll throw Afghanistan and Pakistan into the mix, since they’ve also been a big locus of conflict — just don’t tend to experience much economic growth at all.
-
But the good news here, at least from a conflict-avoidance perspective, is that these countries are getting steadily older. There are a number of countries in the region where median age has already passed the 25-year mark:
-
When Iran threw hundreds of thousands of soldiers against Iraq in “human wave” attacks in the 1980s, the median Iranian was just 17 years old; now, the median Iranian is in their early 30s.
-
Saudi Arabia got involved in the Yemen war, but was reluctant to send ground troops against the Houthis — possibly because the Houthis are formidable, but possibly because the Saudis have relatively few young people to send.
-
troublingly, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, and Pakistan are projected to still be below a median age of 25 a decade from now.
-
all of these countries are still aging at a steady clip — as are the countries that are already over 25. The fundamental reason is the big collapse in fertility rates in the Greater Middle East (and across the broader Muslim world) over the past few decades.
-
When Iran exploded in revolution and fought a titanic war against Iraq in the late 70s and 80s, its fertility was over 6; now it’s down to about 1.5
-
I don’t want to claim that “demography is destiny” here, and it’s all too easy to look at individual countries and tell just-so stories about how aging and fertility might have affected their conflict
-
The old Middle East, with massive crowds of angry young people thronging the streets, ready to explode into nationalist or sectarian or revolutionary violence, is steadily disappearing, being replaced by a more sedate, aging society. Given the horrific outcomes of the last few decades, it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.