Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men: The Strategic Demography of Threats.

This paper explores the demographic representations of threats in the post Cold War security context. Fears of differential fertility between regions, countries and ethnic groups have long been a focus of U.S. national security interests. Today, these fears center on differences in population growth rates between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, and more generally Islamic countries and the West. Youth bulge theories predict that a high proportion of young males within a country predisposes it toward political violence. In the current war on terror defense and intelligence strategists are pointing toward youth bulges as an instigator of violence, especially in the Middle East. The paper also examines the gendered nature of these strategic doctrines as well as their integration into other international and domestic security models, e.g. environmental conflict theory, the superpredator explanation of juvenile crime, and racial profiling. It analyzes their relationship to migration issues and changing demographic realities such as mortality from the AIDS pandemic, slowing of population growth worldwide, and the gray dawn of population aging in the West. Are there subtle differences in the understanding and articulation of these threats among different political interests, e.g. conservative unilateralists and liberal multilateralists? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]