Youth bulges of unemployed young men drive Muslim political violence

Evidence

Finally, and most important, the demographic explosion in Muslim societies and the availability of large numbers of often unemployed males between the ages of fifteen and thirty is a natural source of instability and violence both within Islam and against non-Muslims. Whatever other causes may be at work, this factor alone would go a long way to explaining Muslim violence in the 1980s and 1990s. The aging of this pig-in-the-python generation by the third decade of the twenty-first century and economic development in Muslim societies, if and as that occurs, could consequently lead to a significant reduction in Muslim violence propensities and hence to a general decline in the frequency and intensity of fault line wars. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 736

Categorization

• QUESTION: A falsifiable demographic hypothesis: if the youth bulge predicts violence, then the aging of the 2030s should show a measurable decline. Worth tracking against actual post-2010 Islamist violence data.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘pig in the python’ demographic argument is a rare genuinely testable macro-social claim — the aging of a violent cohort actually allows quasi-forecasting of conflict decline.
• XREF: connects to: Images of co-religionists under attack recruit young Muslims into militancy — Ryan Andrew Brown, Todd C. Helmus, Rajeev Ramchand, Alina I. Palimaru, Sarah Weilant, Ashley L. Rhoades, and Liisa Hiatt (RAND Corporation), Violent Extremism in America:…, 341