Analyzes scale effects across a range of political dimensions, encompassing different political levels using a multi-method approach.

The field of political demography - the politics of population change - is dramatically underrepresented in political science. At a time when demographic changes - aging in the rich world, youth bulges in the developing world, ethnic and religious shifts, migration, and urbanization - are waxing as never before, this neglect is especially glaring and starkly contrasts with the enormous interest coming from policymakers and the media. "Ten years ago, [demography] was hardly on the radar screen," remarks Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two contributors to this volume. "Today," they continue, "it dominates almost any discussion of America's long-term fiscal, economic, or foreign-policy direction." Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences: children born in the last five years will be the new workers, voters, soldiers, and potential insurgents of 2025 and the political elites of the 2050s. Whether in the West or the developing world, political scientists urgently need to understand the tectonics of demography in order to grasp the full context of today's political developments. This book begins to fill the gap from a global and historical perspective and with the hope that scholars and policymakers will take its insights on board to develop enlightened policies for our collective future.

International efforts to regulate fertility rates so that populations do not grow beyond the earth's capacity have included technical assistance and capital; improved health care conditions to lower the risk of infant mortality; increased opportunities to develop literacy; the democratization of governments; and several decades of liberal immigration and refugee policies favoring third world nations. The persistence of high fertility despite international efforts confounds demographers. "Population Politics" brilliantly dissects the paradigm responsible for the counterproductive efforts of nations and international agencies. Abernethy, a renowned anthropologist, shows why policies hamper the shift to lower fertility. Ireland, Indonesia, Cuba, China, Turkey and Egypt are but a few of the countries Abernethy examines, showing how economic, sociocultural, and agricultural factors that have caused population growth can be harnessed to stabilize population size. "Population Politics" is a provocative examination of the influence of aid and liberal immigration policies on world population growth, and often counterproductive to the role of the United States as an industrial power. This volume's uniquely interdisciplinary perspective will enlighten the lay reader, as well as demographers and epidemiologists, conservationists, reproduction and family specialists, agricultural economists, and public health personnel. "Addresses one of the most vexing issues of our time--why after five or more decades of helping' poor countries improve their standard of living, is poverty still the rule? In light of Abernethy's facts, leaders in the United States cannot be excused from rethinking policies with respect to immigration and foreign aid. This book provides a fresh look at classic and neoclassic views of overpopulation."--Kingsley Davis, The Hoover Institution, Stanford, California "A splendid critique of how U.S. foreign aid and liberal immigration [policy] result in population growth here and abroad."--Donald L. Huddle, Rice University, Houston, Texas "Virginia D. Abernethy" is professor emeritus of psychiatry (anthropology) at Vanderbilt Medical School and was for 11 years the editor of the scholarly journal "Population and Environment. "Garrett Hardin" is emeritus professor of human ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This open access book draws the big picture of how population change interplays with politics across the world from 1990 to 2040. Leading social scientists from a wide range of disciplines discuss, for the first time, all major political and policy aspects of population change as they play out differently in each major world region: North and South America; Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region; Western and East Central Europe; Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; East Asia; Southeast Asia; subcontinental India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; Australia and New Zealand. These macro-regional analyses are completed by cross-cutting global analyses of migration, religion and poverty, and age profiles and intra-state conflicts. From all angles, this book shows how strongly contextualized the political management and the political consequences of population change are. While long-term population ageing and short-term migration fluctuations present structural conditions, political actors play a key role in (mis-)managing, manipulating, and (under-)planning population change, which in turn determines how citizens in different groups react.

Population Politics in the Tropics explores fears of population decline and policies in Portuguese Angola from 1890-1945. Utilising a wide range of multilingual archival research and comparative and transimperial perspectives, Samuël Coghe argues that colonial policy was driven by a persistent, but imprecise, idea of demographic crisis.

Curtis discusses census making as a political project, investigating its place in and impact on party politics and ethnic, religious, and sectional struggles.

This book uses political and socio-anthropological theory to examine the relationship between power, interest, and agency within population and family planning discourse across Africa, with particular emphasis on case studies from Tanzania.