This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.

The field of political demography - the politics of population change - is dramatically underrepresented in political science. At a time when demographic changes - aging in the rich world, youth bulges in the developing world, ethnic and religious shifts, migration, and urbanization - are waxing as never before, this neglect is especially glaring and starkly contrasts with the enormous interest coming from policymakers and the media. "Ten years ago, [demography] was hardly on the radar screen," remarks Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two contributors to this volume. "Today," they continue, "it dominates almost any discussion of America's long-term fiscal, economic, or foreign-policy direction." Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences: children born in the last five years will be the new workers, voters, soldiers, and potential insurgents of 2025 and the political elites of the 2050s. Whether in the West or the developing world, political scientists urgently need to understand the tectonics of demography in order to grasp the full context of today's political developments. This book begins to fill the gap from a global and historical perspective and with the hope that scholars and policymakers will take its insights on board to develop enlightened policies for our collective future.

"A timely, stimulating, and very readable volume." - Journal of International Migration and Integration "Essays in the true sense ... they are readable, wide-ranging historically and geographically." - Population and Development Review "The essays are clearly written, well-reasoned and contain a wealth of examples...It will be read with profit by students who are looking for a readable and sensible overview of the field." - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies "Over the past decade, the impacts of demographic trends on international security and on peaceful relations between and within states have come to the fore in ways not seen since the aftermath of World War II. An evolving and more complex set of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations has become the basis for a new look at the security effects of changes in the size, distribution, and composition of populations. This book is an attempt to lay out the new look, to take issue with some of the prevailing views on the political consequences of population change and to suggest where the concerns are realistic and where they are not." (From the Preface) This book not only offers a magisterial analysis of the political effects of the dramatic population changes that are taking place in countries all around the world, it also represents the testimony of one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of migration and population studies. Myron Weiner, former Professor of Political Science at MIT and Chair of the External Research Advisory Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer, is Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York.

Concern about the size of the world’s population did not begin with the Baby Boomers. Overpopulation as a conceptual problem originated after World War I and was understood as an issue with far-reaching ecological, agricultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences. This study traces the idea of a world population problem as it developed from the 1920s through the 1950s, long before the late-1960s notion of a postwar “population bomb.” Drawing on international conference transcripts, the volume reconstructs the twentieth-century discourse on population as an international issue concerned with migration, colonial expansion, sovereignty, and globalization. It connects the genealogy of population discourse to the rise of economically and demographically defined global regions, the characterization of “civilizations” with different standards of living, global attitudes toward “development,” and first- and third-world designations.

This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and political factors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others. This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world’s economy may be going.

Demography is not destiny. As Giacomo Casanova explained over two centuries ago: 'There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our own lives.' Today we are shaping them and our societies more than ever before. Globally, we have never had fewer children per adult: our population is about to stabilize, though we do not know when or at what number, or what will happen after that. It will be the result of billions of very private decisions influenced in turn by multiple events and policies, some more unpredictable than others. More people are moving further around the world than ever before: we too often see that as frightening, rather than as indicating greater freedom. Similarly, we too often lament greater ageing, rather than recognizing it as a tremendous human achievement with numerous benefits to which we must adapt. Demography comes to the fore most positively when we see that we have choices, when we understand variation and when we are not deterministic in our prescriptions. The study of demography has for too long been dominated by pessimism and inhuman, simplistic accounting. As this fascinating and persuasive overview demonstrates, how we understand our demography needs to change again.

Population Politics in the Tropics explores fears of population decline and policies in Portuguese Angola from 1890-1945. Utilising a wide range of multilingual archival research and comparative and transimperial perspectives, Samuël Coghe argues that colonial policy was driven by a persistent, but imprecise, idea of demographic crisis.

Exploring how demographic dynamism continues to shape the character of societies, this forward-looking Research Agenda offers insights into how the human population has undergone fundamental demographic shifts, and the impact these have had on how we organize ourselves politically, the design of our economic systems, and even our societal relationships.

"Remarkably, most conventional wisdom about the shifting balance of world power virtually ignores one of the most fundamental components of power: population. The studies that do consider international security and demographic trends almost unanimously focus on population growth as a liability. In contrast, the distinguished contributors to this volume--security experts from the Naval War College, the American Enterprise Institute, and other think tanks--contend that demographic decline in key world powers now poses a profound challenge to global stability. The countries at greatest risk are in the developed world, where birthrates are falling and populations are aging. Many have already lost significant human capital, capital that would have helped them innovate and fuel their economy, man their armed forces, and secure a place at the table of world power. By examining the effects of diverging population trends between the United States and Europe and the effects of rapid population aging in Japan, India, and China, this book uncovers increasing tensions within the transatlantic alliance and destabilizing trends in Asian security. Thus, it argues, relative demographic decline may well make the world less, and not more, secure."--Publisher.

The generation into which each person is born, the demographic composition of that cohort, and its relation to those born at the same time in other places influences not only a person's life chances, but also the economic and political structures within which that life is lived; the person's access to social and natural resources (food, water, education, jobs, sexual partners); and even the length of that person's life. Demography, literally the study of people, addresses the size, distribution, composition, and density of populations, and considers the impact the drivers which mediate these will have on both individual lives and the changing structure of human populations. This Very Short Introduction considers the way in which the global population has evolved over time and space. Sarah Harper discusses the theorists, theories, and methods involved in studying population trends and movements, before looking at the emergence of new demographic sub-disciplines and addressing some of the future population challenges of the 21st century. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.