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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category aging.
  • Mexico Is Growing Old. Can It Build a Care System in Time?

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    Dot-Mom  //  Guest Contributor  //  February 26, 2025  //  By Carin Zissis

    Elvia León, the youngest of seven children, wanted to leave Bomintzhá back in 1987. “I told my mother that I didn’t want to live in that kind of poverty, and she supported me.” Her father was less pleased with her plans to abandon their small community in Mexico’s Hidalgo state to study in the city of Querétaro. “The culture here is that women are meant to be at home, doing domestic chores.”

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  • Should Demography Weigh in on U.S. Response to Coups d’Etat?

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    Guest Contributor  //  February 14, 2023  //  By Richard Cincotta
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    The research presented in this article was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed article: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/spp-2023-0029/html

    When a military-led or military-influenced coup d’état occur in a foreign country, does evidence from demographic research merit consideration in the U.S. foreign policy response? It’s a question that U.S. policymakers should be asking as deteriorating political conditions in West Africa come increasingly into confluence with the limited tools available either to deter or respond to illegal and extra-legal forms of political succession.

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

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

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    Covid-19  //  Guest Contributor  //  May 26, 2020  //  By Richard Cincotta
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    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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  • All the Population Future We Cannot See

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  December 17, 2019  //  By Robert Engelman

    Engelman-645x430In the quarter century the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program has been pondering the issues for which it’s named, the world’s demographic future has been wobbling. A key concern of analysts: How many people will farmers need to feed in 2050? Mainstream projections have teetered between 8.9 billion and 9.8 billion, amounting to an increase of between 13 and 21 percent over today’s 7.7 billion. This significant variation in projections is rarely acknowledged by prognosticators. Many simply round up today’s latest guess and state confidently that there will be 10 billion people in 2050—though just a few years ago, the number most confidently stated was 9 billion.

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  • Which Demographic “End of History”?

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    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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  • Three Trends to Track in Population-Environment-Security

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    Guest Contributor  //  Uncharted Territory  //  December 9, 2019  //  By Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba

    16101001887_5b5a5b267e_c-e1575898746733Exactly 25 years ago the international community met in Cairo for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. In the aftermath of the Cold War, ethnic conflict seemed to be exploding globally and research on the role of population growth and resource scarcity found an eager audience among policy makers struggling to understand this new international disorder. ECSP’s founding in that same year positioned the program as a leader in bringing together the scholarly and policy communities around non-traditional security issues over the last 25 years. The last two-and-a-half decades have brought tremendous change in population trends, environmental change, and the security landscape. Over the next 25 years three trends will shape the agenda of those working on the nexus of population-environment-security issues.

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  • The Global Care Tilt: Migrant Caregivers Flock to Wealthy Countries to Meet Rising Demand

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    Dot-Mom  //  Guest Contributor  //  April 3, 2019  //  By Sonya Michel
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    This article is the third in a three-part series on migration and caregiving. Carework is growing faster than any other sector in our economy and migrant women, who have long held caregiving jobs in the United States, are unable to meet these needs due to our current immigration system.

    With rapidly aging populations and rising levels of female employment, the United States and other wealthy nations are facing unprecedented demands for non-familial care. These nations vary in their ability to address such demands. Those with more robust welfare states, including publicly supported, high-quality child care and elder care services and facilities, are generally able to meet growing needs for care, while those with weaker welfare states experience severe “care deficits,” leaving families with few alternatives. Increasingly, in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, families are turning to migrants—usually women—to solve their care dilemmas.

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