Urdal & Hoelscher: Urban Youth Bulges and Social Disorder of Namibia’s 15-19 year old urban youth are unemployed compared to 24.2% of rural youth and 19.5% of the general working age population overall (Kayenze et al, 2000: 7).

A challenge when assessing the level of economic exclusion among young people across countries and time is the lack of relevant indicators. Youth unemployment rates are provided by the ILO only as estimates on the regional level, lacking good and comparable country-level data (ILO, 2008). In addition to using indicators of underemployment, measured as unemployment rates and employment in the informal sector, we also assume that overall changes in income per capita is a proxy that to some extent captures changes in employment opportunities among young people: H2: The lower prospects for employment, the greater the effect of large urban youth bulges on urban social disorder.

H3: The lower per capita growth in income, the greater the effect of large urban youth bulges on urban social disorder.

# **2.2 Education**

Generally, higher education is a factor that should be expected to reduce the likelihood that young people engage in political violence, due to higher opportunity cost (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004). This argument may pertain in particular to the recruitment to rebel organizations. Young men with low education and low prospects for employment are more susceptible to joining a rebel group as a way to generate a livelihood. Interestingly, Oyefusi (2008) finds that while educated youth in the Niger Delta were generally more politically mobilized and more aggrieved, uneducated youth were more likely to be willing to participate in armed struggle for local resource control. This is also supported by Barker & Ricardo (2005). Furthermore, low education levels are generally associated with higher risks of armed conflict (Thyne, 2006; Barakat & Urdal, 2008).

But it has also been suggested that high unemployment among educated youth is one of the most destabilizing and potentially violent socio-political phenomena in any regime (Choucri, 1974: 73; Braungart, 1984: 16; Goldstone, 2001; Winckler, 2002: 635). In countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), many Islamic movements that challenged authoritarian governments in the 1990s were fueled by large educated youth cohorts entering the labor markets during a period of weak economic conditions (Yousef, 2003: 23). In many countries it has also been observed that educated youth experience higher unemployment rates than uneducated youth. In the 1990s, for example, MENA had the world’s highest youth unemployment rates, yet the expansion of education had little impact on reducing this. In Morocco and Algeria, unemployment rates among higher educated youth have been as high as 70% (World Bank, 2008: 220). But there is also an issue of mismatch between the skills that students obtain and the demands of the labor market in MENA. Here higher education is largely seen as a way to secure public sector employment, a legacy from large-scale public employment schemes. The education system does not, however, stimulate the development of skills that are in demand in the growing private sector, such as independent and critical thinking (Salehi-Isfahani and Dhillon, 2008; World Bank, 2008). The expansion of tertiary education without the ability for graduates to be absorbed in to the labour force has been argued to have a radicalizing effect and aid recruitment 5