Young Men

In their investigation into the different factors leading to civil war, Stanford University professors David Laitin and James Fearon establish some important correlations between social conditions and violence. In addition to poverty, geography, and “state weakness”, they stipulate that a country’s age distribution, in particular the abundance of young males from the age of 15-24, who “have physical and perhaps psychological characteristics that make them apt guerillas,” can tip an already unstable situation toward the brink of civil conflict. In “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War,” an article they published in 2003, they suggest that this could be a serious factor contributing to the abundance of recent civil conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia.

This realization could very well explain an October 2008 report by the Brookings Institute entitled “The Prospects of Youth Radicalization in Pakistan: Implications for US Policy,” which among other things recommends targeting socio-economic aid at Pakistani youth instead of focusing primarily on counter-terrorism. Although the Pakistani government certainly faces internal challenges, such as its inability or unwillingness to govern the tribal belts of the NWFP or controlling groups originally supported by the ISI like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, neighboring Afghanistan exhibits even greater symptoms of civil war with respect to the postulations of Laitin and Fearon (in addition to the conflict currently underway). With a per capita income of $1000, at least sixty percent of the population under 25, and a government currently under siege, (not to mention the centrality of the Hindu Kush to the country’s geography) the case of Afghanistan unfortunately strongly supports the Stanford professors’ correlations. These findings and other suggest that developing an institutional alternative to violence through educational reform and the promotion of sustainable economic growth appear to be the most important facets of any approach to quelling emerging civil conflicts in South Asia and the “developing” world more broadly.