Breaking the Waves? Education, Youth Bulges, and Armed Conflict invoking security arguments is often helpful for rallying support behind a specific policy. Rather, identifying more specifically what forms of education and under what conditions educational reform may help break the general adverse relationship between youth bulges and political violence can form the basis for developing better policy instruments for engaging youth in development rather than violence.

The issue of age structure aside, the interaction of schooling and national conflict has attracted increasing interest from educational researchers for at least a decade. Initially attention focused primarily on the detrimental effects of violent conflict on educational development, Education for All (EFA) and educational MDGs (c.f. Machel, 1996; Bensalah et al., 2000). More recently, the ways in which inequitable schooling and discriminatory curricula can actively contribute to violence have been exposed, leading to the notion of ‘the two faces of education in conflict’ (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Davies, 2004). Tomlinson & Benefield (2005) provide a recent review of the field. To date, most of this research has been qualitative, reflecting the fact that the research agenda has been driven by the concerns of practitioners and researchers ‘in the field’, a lack of comparable international data, and the complexity of the interaction.

Despite the different nature and emphasis of the present study, the body of research on ‘education and conflict’ offers a warning important to any attempt to study the effect of schooling ‘outcomes’ (attainment levels) on violent conflict, namely that the educational process and content have been shown to matter. Much variability is to be expected in the effect of high participation in secondary schooling, since ‘secondary schooling’ can, depending on context, mean either exposure to incitement and a culture and logic of violence, as an examination of textbooks in Afghanistan (Spink, 2005) or pre-genocide Rwanda (Obura, 2003) show, or to civics and peace education.

We are using a newly constructed dataset measuring cohort-specific educational attainment rates. The dataset, developed by researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), contains timeseries data from 1970-2000 for 120 countries. Based on age-specific education data from national censuses and Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), the project has performed demographic back-projections to arrive at the most consistent and complete education dataset available, representing a vast improvement over existing education datasets that primarily measure educational enrollment. Since it is primarily young men who are the perpetrators of violence, this paper focuses on educational attainment for young men, as well as the size of young male cohorts. Armed conflict refers to low-intensity internal conflict as defined by the Uppsala/PRIO dataset (Gleditsch et al. 2002). We are also employing two different age composition measures, a procedure aimed at discriminating between rival explanations in the youth bulge literature. The Relative Youth Cohort Size (RYCS) measure is more sensitive to reduced employment opportunities arising from a rapid increase in the size of youth cohorts relative to the immediate preceding cohorts (Easterlin, 1987; Korenman & Neumark, 1997; Machunovich, 2000), while the conventional youth bulge measure captures the overall abundance or density of youth in the adult population determining the relative availability of potential rebel soldiers with generally low opportunity cost. We specifically address the role age structure and education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Exploring whether expanding education in SubSaharan Africa may contribute to curb conflict in one of the poorest and least stable regions of the world has important policy implications.

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