Blame it on my Youth: Exploring the Relationship between Youth Bulges, Education Gaps, and Civil Unrest

• In Event: Challenges, crisis contexts, and complexities in education

Proposal

This topic is relevant to CIES 2025 as it is a comparative analysis of data from 30 countries across Africa over a twenty year period, focusing on the interplay between education levels, gender, and civil unrest. In the past, research on unrest solely tended to focus on education levels and lack of economic opportunities of young men, and disproportionately focused on violent unrest. This research fills that gap by looking at the increasing education levels of women and their evolving role as political actors in civil unrest. As we imagine the future of education and the changing landscape, we must also consider the impacts of that education and how to better prepare governments and economies for the next generations. Primarily, civil unrest occurs when there is a disconnect between expectations and reality for a population. This can be exacerbated by existing grievances with governments or economic status, and can escalate quickly.

Youth unrest has drawn the scholarly attention of many who study destabilization through the years, with connections made between high youth numbers and poor economic conditions leading to civil unrest. This literature, however, is now getting renewed attention as the percentage of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 25 now accounts for over 60% of the population (Dews, 2019). Yet warnings about this ‘youth bulge’ and its potential to cause civil unrest have persisted for over a decade (Agbor et al., 2011). And while the total youth population is skyrocketing, Sub-Saharan Africa’s youth bulge hit its peak as a percentage of the total population around 2000 and has been steadily declining ever since. However, the overall percentage of the youth population is still higher in sub-Saharan African than any other region, even at their respective peaks (Zapata, 2023). This combination of the higher total number of youth population and the limited resources seems prime for upcoming conflict. This narrative no doubt sounds familiar—the same argument was at play during Industrialization and has come up multiple times in the century and a half since as fears of an exponentially growing population subsist on a finite number of resources. This Malthusian dilemma has never come to fruition in the way he originally predicted, but just because there is no ‘doomsday’ end of resources does not mean that this demographic challenge cannot have a significant negative impact on a country’s stability.
This youth boom has been lauded by some as Africa’s great opportunity—where the economies of several countries could experience a boom from this deluge of potential labor. Others have remarked on the incredible power of youth to innovate and transform the world, especially in the realms of technological innovations (El-Habti, 2022). Indeed, as many countries around the world deal with declining fertility rates and unsustainable aging populations, to many, the African demographic dividend heralds an endless array of opportunities for change. And while it is true that this massive youth population could result in economic benefits, there is an underlying danger to it as well. Without forward-thinking government policies to manage this rapid demographic change, countries in the continent run the risk of significant political instability.
And while there has been a significant body of research connecting youth bulges and unemployment rates to civil unrest, there has not been a systematic study on the impact of uneven educational opportunities on civil unrest. This research paper will investigate the role of education as a mediating factor between youth bulges and conflict, examining rates of education gaps across multiple African countries.
While it is commonly understood that certain forms of political unrest, such as terrorism, are skewed disproportionately towards male involvement (Abrahms, 2008), the gender balance in recent years for other forms of civil and political unrest have been largely unexplored. Even though Barakat & Urdal did find evidence that secondary school achievement for both genders was more predictive than male secondary attainment alone, this was explained away as women contributing to an “indirect pacifying effect” on men instead of exploring this phenomenon further (2009, p. 25). This made a certain amount of sense as previous to the 2000s, girls’ education levels were dreadfully low globally compared to their male counterparts. But more recently, due to the enactment of the Millennium Development Goals and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals, girls’ education levels have risen substantially. This means that young women now find themselves in positions similar to their male peers—where they have been educated but have little to no job prospects, and are increasingly disillusioned with their governments. In addition, women’s involvement in politics over the past twenty years has also risen exponentially, and women’s presence at political protests around the world has become commonplace.

To that end, this work will serve to further the work of Weber (2019) and Barakat & Ural (2009) by using data from 2000-2022 on incidents of civil unrest, looking at both the post-primary and post-secondary transitions for youth bulges in Africa to determine if there is a causal link between increased educational attainment for youth coupled with limited economic opportunities that leads to civil unrest. This research also specifically focuses on the gender component of youth bulges to see what the relative increase has been in incidences of civil unrest in this same time period, as young women have become increasingly politically active and experienced higher rates of educational attainment than in years past.

In investigating this research question, sources such as the World Bank, the UN, and other repositories of demographic and educational data were used, paired with information from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which contains data for African countries since 1997 on civil unrest events including political violence, protests and riots, and do not limit events to those where individuals died. In order to test the hypotheses, this data was compiled by country and entered into R to conduct a linear regression analysis and was supplemented by qualitative survey information from the AfroBarometer survey to contextualize the results.

Author

• Elizabeth Ann Marsden, RTI International/George Mason University