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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Richard Cincotta

Richard Cincotta

Richard Cincotta is a Wilson Center global fellow and director of the Global Political Demography Program at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC.

His research focuses on the influence of the demographic transition on political, institutional, and environmental conditions. He has served as the director of social science and demographic programs in the National Intelligence Council’s Long Range Analysis Unit and as a AAAS fellow in USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health. His writing on demography has appeared in Foreign Policy, Current History, Nature, and Science, and he contributed to the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 and 2030 reports.

Cincotta is trained as a population biologist and is a graduate of Syracuse University/SUNY College of ESF (BS) and Colorado State University (MS, PhD).

Email: RCincotta@Stimson.org

  • Youthful Demographic Conditions Could Push the Sahel to an “Afghanistan Moment”

    ›
    Africa in Transition  //  Guest Contributor  //  February 8, 2022  //  By Richard Cincotta & Stephen Smith

    Map SahelCet essai a été mis à jour avec une traduction française, disponible après la version anglaise, ci-dessous. 

    The countries of the Western Sahel find themselves in the tightening grip of a set of mutually reinforcing crises. These include deepening seasonal food insecurity and surges of food-aid dependency, widening income inequalities, widespread childhood stunting, low levels of education attainment and pervasive unemployment, as well as acute political instability and a rapidly growing Islamist-led insurgency that has already displaced some 2.5 million people across the region. In our recent report, What Future for the Western Sahel? The Region’s Demography and Its Implications by 2045, (published by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security), we argue that, unless the Sahelian states focus on reversing the underlying conditions that sustain high fertility—the cause of a persistently youthful and rapidly growing population—they will likely not be able to resolve these crises in the foreseeable future.  

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  • Thomas Sankara’s Lost Legacy

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  December 6, 2021  //  By Richard Cincotta
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    Cet essai a été mis à jour avec une traduction française, disponible après la version anglaise, ci-dessous. 

    Thirty-four years ago, Burkina Faso’s president, Thomas Sankara, was murdered. Only now are his alleged assassins on trial. Had he survived, the arid, landlocked country of more than 20 million people might well have taken a far different path to development.

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  • Predicting the Rise and Demise of Liberal Democracy: How Well Did We Do?

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  August 17, 2021  //  By Richard Cincotta
    Cairo,,Egypt,-,Nov,22-thousands,Of,Protesters,Flocked,To,Cairo's

    In 2007, at the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council, a colleague and I set out to determine if we could forecast two distinct political phenomena, the rise and the demise of high levels of democracy. To guide our decade-long forecasts, we relied on a simple statistical model and a spreadsheet of demographic projections from the UN’s 2006 World Population Prospects data set. Now that the experimental period (from 2010 to 2020) has ended, we can look back and ask: How well did these forecasts perform? 

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  • A Tale of Two Transitions: Education, Urbanization, and the U.S. Presidential Election

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  November 23, 2020  //  By Richard Cincotta

    Rather than delve into issue opinion polling, or assess presidential campaign strategies, political demographers assume that political change is the predictable product of a set of mutually reinforcing social, economic, and demographic transitions, which can be tracked using data. But is this true in a country like the United States that has been in the advanced stages of these development transitions for decades? If these transitions are as important as demographers believe, could their variation among the 50 states explain the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election? If so, what could they tell us about America’s electoral future?

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  • Population Age Structure: The Hidden Factor in COVID-19 Mortality

    ›
    Covid-19  //  Guest Contributor  //  May 26, 2020  //  By Richard Cincotta
    49807696311_fa3e5a3634_c

    Until several months ago, demographers regarded a youthful age structure as an unequivocally detrimental demographic characteristic. Where more than half of the population is younger than age 25, countries are unable to attain high levels of economic and human capital development and face an increased risk of some forms of civil conflict. Yet, so far, during the ongoing pre-vaccine stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most age-structurally mature countries have been hardest hit by the disease. These countries are generally urbanized, wealthy, well-educated, and include a large proportion of seniors. And, somewhat surprisingly—despite being equipped with advanced medical technologies—these countries are experiencing the highest rates of mortality from complications related to COVID-19.

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  • Emulating Botswana’s Approach to Reproductive Health Services Could Speed Development in the Sahel

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  January 27, 2020  //  By Richard Cincotta
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    The Western Sahel region—a cluster of arid, low-income countries stretching from Senegal, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, inland to Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Chad—is home to the world’s most youthful populations. According to current UN Population Division estimates, about 57 percent of this six-country region’s population is 19 years old or younger. As security conditions deteriorate across the rural Sahel, governments in Europe and North Africa are taking notice of these countries’ demographic status—and for good reasons. Sustained population youthfulness (often called a “youth bulge”) contributes to low levels of educational attainment, joblessness and social immobility, and ultimately to rapid population growth, which tends to drive declines in per-capita availability of freshwater and other critical natural resources: factors that are associated with the risk of persistent violent conflict and represent powerful push factors for migration.

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  • Which Demographic “End of History”?

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  December 9, 2019  //  By Richard Cincotta

    8231679108_23b63c2f4b_c-e1575900279871First published 30 years ago in the National Interest, Francis Fukuyama’s landmark essay, “The End of History?,” argued that, with the fall of fascism and communism, no serious blueprint for modern-state development lay open, save for those paths that would ultimately embrace both political and economic liberalism. Over the past two decades, movement toward this ideal end-state has trickled to a halt. Instead, the political elites of Eurasia’s regional powers—Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China—have crafted stable illiberal regimes that borrow whatever they need from free-market economics, electoral politics, nationalism, and religion. Their ascent has produced a form of “non-endpoint stability”—two mutually antagonistic camps: one composed of liberal democracies, the other a mix of illiberal hybrids. As long as these camps remain stable, the international system falls far short of Fukuyama’s theoretical end of history.

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  • Does Demographic Change Set the Pace of Development?

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    Guest Contributor  //  December 3, 2018  //  By Richard Cincotta
    KOCIS_Ban_KiMoon_Lecture_in_Korea_04_(9620811088)

    This year, 2018, marks the 60th anniversary of a landmark publication by a pair of academic social scientists who first recognized the close relationship between population age structure (the distribution of a country’s population, by age) and development. In Population Growth and Development in Low Income Countries (Princeton U. Press, 1958), demographer Ansley Coale (1917-2002) and economist Edgar M. Hoover (1907-1992) theorized that eventual declines in fertility would transform developing-country age structures. Coale and Hoover demonstrated that these newly transformed age structures would exhibit larger shares of citizens in the working ages, and smaller shares of dependent children and seniors (Fig. 1). This transition, they argued, would someday help lift countries with youthful populations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the low-income bracket.

    MORE
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