The Demographic Security Dilemma.

The demographic literature on population growth among ethnic minorities observes a puzzling trend: Minorities tend to have higher rates of natural increase than majorities. With recourse to the sociobiological paradigm of interethnic behaviour proposed by van den Berghe (1978, 1981), this paper accounts for this puzzle by positing the notion of a demographic security dilemma. The realist tenet of the international-relations literature holds that conditions of anarchy give rise to a "security dilemma" in which even non-aggressive moves to enhance one's security are perceived by others as threatening and trigger countermoves that ultimately reduce one's own security (Jervis 1978). Although the "security dilemma" has been discounted as a viable explanation of political stability during the second half of the twentieth century (Holsti 1991, 1995, 1996) it has been shown to have a useful application to domestic ethnic conflict (Posen 1993). The paper refines this latter application. It hypothesizes that states where an already sizeable ethnic minority exhibits higher rates of natural increase than the dominant majority tend to take protective measures to bolster the majority's grip on power but that these measures, in turn, precipitate higher fertility rates as an unintended consequence. The paper uses the demographic exceptionalism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a test case. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]