Breaking the Waves? Education, Youth Bulges, and Armed Conflict opportunities of young people (e.g. Salehi-Isfahani & Dhillon, 2008: 14). Finally, the outcome measure, while standard, captures only one specific aspect of national conflict. Measures of political unrest might in principle produce stronger results, but are of questionable reliability.

Given all these constraints, the stronger age structure effect in the context of low education is surprisingly clear-cut. It indicates that the connection is real and robust. By itself, this result does not conclusively prove that the connection is causal. Even though the level of the specific education variable used here is determined at an earlier point in time than the conflict outcome is measured, it may be the case that both youth education and conflict risk are determined by an even earlier shared cause, but with different lags.

Nevertheless, the results of this study are particularly interesting in that they are easier to explain with reference to some hypotheses concerning the effect of youth education on conflict than with reference to others. The fact that in low youth education contexts there is a strong age structure effect, and particularly so in low and middle income countries, supports an argument based on opportunity costs, namely that the incentive to participate in violent conflict is lower for more highly educated youths. These results support Hypotheses 1 and 2, while Hypothesis 3 relating the risk of youth and low education in particular to countries’ dependence on income from primary commodity exports is unsupported. Similarly, there does not appear to be an interaction effect in countries with large agricultural sectors. A different theoretical argument, namely that expanding cohorts of relatively well educated youth are more easily frustrated by lack of opportunities for either further education or jobs, formulated in Hypotheses 4 and 5, is not supported by the present analysis. In this context it is worth re-emphasizing that the dependent variable here is a criterion of deaths due to political violence. It might well be that great expansions in the number of university students are a greater risk factor for political unrest short of mass violence; the present analysis merely suggests they do not increase the risk of fatal organized political violence.

A caveat is required here. Strictly speaking, the conclusion that it is large numbers of under-educated male youths that increase the risk of conflict is unwarranted and represents an instance of the ‘ecological fallacy’. The statistical results do not exclude the possibility that in the low education contexts it is in fact the few _highly_ educated individuals that contribute to conflict. While consistent with the numbers, this alternative interpretation seems implausible from a theoretical point of view. It is also not supported by recent micro-level studies by Brett & Specht (2004), Humphreys (2005) and Oyefusi (2008), suggesting that low education increases the propensity to recruit as rebels. Our results also suggest that increasing educational levels for females may have an indirect pacifying effect.

Nevertheless this study can only be a first step in improving our understanding of the link between education, demography and conflict. Further research is required. The most obvious next step is to include a greater number of countries/territories and increase coverage in time. The IIASA backprojection methodology cannot robustly be extended further back than 1970, but data for the period 2000-2005, and for additional countries, should become available in the near future. In terms of testing the opportunity cost argument further, the single most useful piece of information would be youth unemployment figures for different levels of education. These are already available for a small subset of countries and years, but not sufficiently many to be statistically useful.

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