| Description |
This proposal seeks support for research on demography and conflict dynamics that builds on the principal investigator’s current work and expertise. The core focus of the research is an historical and statistical examination of the interaction of demographic factors and their impact on political conflict and violence, with a particular focus on India. The main objectives are theoretical and empirical: to develop a framework for understanding how demographic dynamics influence political conflict and violence, and a data set of conflict episodes and demographic variables. It will use state-of-the-art statistical methods to study important questions related to demography and politics.
This project brings together a number of disciplines, including political science, history, statistics, economics and demography. Three main factors relating to political violence will be analysed: differential population growth and youth bulges, and then how these are related to horizontal inequality.
Although this project initially focuses on India, the implications will be broadened to include other areas of world, in particular Europe. Consider the case of former Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, a case I explored in my first book. This country underwent profound ethnic shifts particularly between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs in the Kosovo as result of fertility rates and migration. Similar dynamics are at work more broadly in Europe as fertility rates continue to decline in a fair number of countries (in some there is a bit of recovery, e.g. France and Sweden), putting pressure on these countries in terms of labour forces and immigration. These are the same dynamics I be examining in India and expect to explore them more broadly across the states of Europe and beyond.
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