Urdal & Hoelscher: Urban Youth Bulges and Social Disorder

# **5. Discussion**

Issues of urban governance and urban insecurities have received increasing attention with the rapid urbanization rates in many developing countries. Many governments also perceive rapid urban growth as problematic and have implemented measures to curb urban growth rates. This paper addresses one of the emerging urban security concerns, whether large young male populations congregating in urban centers may contribute to political instability and violence, here generally referred to as ‘social disorder’. While large young male populations in urban centers are often perceived as a potential source of instability and violence in the context of high levels of economic, social and political exclusion, urban centers may also offer better economic opportunities for young people compared to rural areas. Hence, under some conditions, the migration of young people from the countryside to cities could contribute to reduce overall youth exclusion, and should not necessarily be expected to increase levels of urban social disorder.

This paper offers an empirical analysis into the relationships between urban male youth bulges, youth exclusion, and social disorder. The analysis contributes to the recent move towards geographically disaggregated analysis in quantitative studies of political violence by investigating these relationships at the city-level. We are utilizing a new dataset on social disturbance events for 55 large urban centers in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa for the 1960-2006 period, and combine these in a time-series analysis with data on the city or urban level as well as national-level indicators. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative analysis of political instability and violence looking only at cities, and given the lack of comparable studies, the results should be interpreted with some caution. Taken together, the empirical investigation concludes that large urban male youth bulges do not seem to generally increase levels of social disorder in large cities in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Most importantly, large urban male youth bulges do not seem to equate high levels of youth frustration and exclusion. Hence, the extent of youth exclusion may not primarily be a product of the relative number of youth in cities. However, a relationship that in particular calls for a more detailed analysis, is that when we only look at the cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, _growth_ in the youth population aged 15-24 is associated with a significantly lower risk of social disturbance, while higher _levels_ of young males in the adult male population is associated with more lethal events. This may suggest that rural to urban migration of youth is particularly high in periods and places where opportunities for urban jobs and education are good, so that urban youth growth rates is really an indicator of relatively low youth exclusion.

Furthermore, large urban male youth populations do not seem to increase the risk of disturbance more even in the context of low secondary education opportunities, or after the expansion of tertiary education that could cause a rapid increase in the number of highly educated youth with limited employment opportunities. Similarly, also in the context of high levels of informal employment, low economic growth, or gender imbalances in the urban youth population, large urban male youth bulges appear to be unrelated to social disorder. However, while there is no strong statistical relationship between urban youth bulges and social disorder, even in the context of unfavorable conditions, several other factors that may greatly affect opportunities for youth are significantly contributing to explain where and when social disorder events take place. First, semi-democratic regimes experience more social disturbance events, presumably due to a lack of institutional arrangements that allow people to voice their grievances nonviolently at the same time as such regimes generally lack the capacity to effectively suppress dissent (see also Hegre et al. 2001). Recruitment opportunities to political positions may in many 17