Dangerous Youth: why Do Political Uprisings Take an Unarmed Form?

Abstract

Quantitative cross-national studies of the factors of violent (armed) versus nonviolent (unarmed) revolutionary events are very few, and they do not pay enough attention to such a powerful factor as a high proportion of young people in the total adult population – the “youth bulge”. We assume that (1) revolutionary uprisings in countries with a greater youth bulge will be significantly more likely to take armed form than in countries with a significantly lower value of this indicator. We also assume that (2) the higher the median age of the population, the higher the likelihood for a revolutionary uprising take an unarmed character. In general, both of our hypotheses are fully confirmed. Thus, there is a reason to believe that the significant increase in the median age of the population observed at the global level in the recent decades could have contributed to a noticeable decrease in the share of armed revolutionary uprisings and an increase in the share of unarmed ones.