 My work is primarily in the security conflict domain more so than the development domain, but I think there are some interesting, obviously, meeting points, and especially with the topic of this conference, some obvious ones. I've been asked to speak, I'm going to try to do three things, which is never a good idea when you're doing a presentation, but I'll keep most focus on the middle part. I'm going to review some of the literature on the relationship between youth bulges or age structure transitions and conflict and instability, and focus on how education can be a mediator in this relationship, which is based on a paper I've done together with Bilal Barakat for the World Bank, which we are updating now for wider. And then make some brief comments on some of the extensions here that we're working on in a new PREO project in collaboration with the African School of Economics in Benin on the broader demographic dividends, and this also ties nicely into some of the comments made by the commissioner this morning about youth as an asset and a partner in long-term peace building. So for those of you who follow some of the discussions in the demographic, political demography field, there is now extensive focus on some of these mega trends and the impact these will have fundamentally on development and also political and security domains, where we see both shifting demographic weights globally, adding to the shifting geopolitics that we're seeing. We're seeing population aging in the global north, and perhaps more importantly, so both for security and development, age structure transitions in the global south happening at very different pace. We're also seeing rapid urbanization, while that is an interesting and important and I think to some extent neglected area also in the security field. My focus here is going to be on the age structure transitions in the global south. We heard this morning that we're now seeing the largest youth populations that have been observed historically. That's true. If you look at the solid line, that's the number of youth and we're now at around 1.2 billion youth between the ages of 15 and 24. That is going to increase somewhat over the next decades, but not a whole lot. We've reached a bit of a plateau, but if you look at the dotted line, the peak youth, if you want, in relative terms was actually back in the mid-1970s. This is the proportion of youth between 15 and 24 as a proportion of 15 years plus. We are seeing youth in most region declining as a proportion of the adult population, but as you can imagine, this is looking very differently across the globe. This is what we then define as youth bulges. As you can see with the European line at the bottom, the light blue, we're now well below 15% of the adult population being 15 to 24-year-olds. While we've seen very significant declines in Asia and it says North Africa should be North Africa in the Middle East, and we've seen some of the most spectacular declines in many Middle Eastern countries like Iran that since the early 1990s have gone from having 5.5 children per woman now down to less than two. There are in many Arab countries and other Middle Eastern countries similar declines in fertility, similar with Asian countries, and of course East Asia is a well-known case, but there are also other spectacular declines in fertility that results in these declines overall in youth bulges. The region that is somewhat behind in their demographic transition is sub-Saharan Africa where fertility is still high in many countries, but where we are seeing now fertility coming down also on this continent, and the expectation is that this will likely continue, but of course with considerable uncertainties. So what do we know about youth bulges and instability? Arguably large youth bulges can be associated both with increased motives for conflict associated with grievances over lack of access to education to political participation and to employment, and at least an outcome, but also opportunity for conflict in the sense that they're depressing the cost of conflict. So youth generally have low opportunity costs, and that is something that generally facilitates recruitment, and particularly in settings with low levels of education and low opportunities in the labor market. And then you on top of that have the what demographic political demographers refer to as relative court-sized effects, where you have an increased pressure, special male wages in societies with large and increasing youth populations. There are a number of studies that have looked at the relationship between youth bulges and armed conflict, and a study that I did back in 2006 found very clear and strong effects of increased risk of armed conflict onset of youth bulges. Weber back in 2010 did a study showing that greater political instability was a result of these age-structured transitions, Nugas and Davenport, and a report in a study on government repression that governments respond with higher levels of repression in the face of youth bulges, and interestingly, and I'll build on this a little bit, there seems to be an effect, the effect of large youth bulges seems to be something that is primarily identified in high fertility contexts, meaning in the early phases of the demographic transition or the second demographic transition from high to low fertility. And this indicates that when states and societies are moving from high fertility to low fertility contexts, it means that there is an opening for what we often refer to as the demographic dividend or the demographic bonus. And this is where we segue into the issue of precisely when can we draw on these enormous resources that youth represent in society moving from youth being seen as a risk factor to a question about how we may be able to realize the demographic dividend. And the sort of core idea behind the demographic dividend, which has been empirically observed in the Asian tiger economists primarily, and was first identified there as a significant factor, then being estimated to have contributed roughly to a third of the economic growth of the tiger economists growth in 1970s, 1980s, and early 90s, the core idea is that declining depends ratio, so the fewer depends as a result of decreasing fertility both leads to increasing labor supply, when the prior large youth, the young courts then grow up to become part of labor supply, and then investments can be shifted away from schooling and healthcare in the sort of high fertility, from the high fertility setting. Obviously this is dependent on conditional on the labor market and on human capital investments, so this is often referred to as a demographic window of opportunity, it doesn't have to be realized, but it depends on these conditional factors where education is one of them. The sort of the classical demographic situation is the one of South Korea, and here you will see that the blue line is the youth bulges in South Korea going back to 1950, starting to decline already in the early 1980s, and at the same time as the support ratio, which is the opposite of the dependency ratio, so the number of supporters, meaning those between the ages of 15 and 64 in the population per dependent, under 15 and over 64, so as the fertility is declining, support ratio is increasing, and South Korea is now at level with more than two and a half supporters per dependent, it will decline rapidly in South Korea in the years to come, but this is the ideal scenario for a demographic window of opportunity. If we're looking at support ratios worldwide, we can see that the areas that are currently seeing the highest support ratios are Asia and also Latin America, with latter largely seen as having not being able to take advantage of their demographic window of opportunity, while Sub-Saharan Africa is still as a region, just a little bit above one to one in terms of support to dependence. So it's a very different, and it's up in the next decade to come, still very low support ratios in most Sub-Saharan African countries. So education, which was the basis for the paper that we did for the World Bank, we're looking into the potential mediating role of education as a factor that increases economic opportunities in society for youth bolsters, again contingent on the labour market and economic opportunities more broadly. There have also been concerns from the perspective of security conflict analysis that if you increase education, access to education especially secondary and tertiary education too rapidly, that might contribute to expand also expectations and that unmet expectations can backfire in the sense of also increasing potential for instability as a result of that. And there has been some concerns obviously over the relevance and quality of education, which isn't easily measurable in the data that we are using, which is data from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, which has some extremely nice and useful back projections on cohorts and gender going back to 1970 for 120 countries. And we also use this to project forward. If just very briefly looking at our main focus is on male secondary education, because this has been the primary focus area, but we're also interested in looking at gender parity in education. I'll return to that briefly, but as this graph shows, if you're looking at male secondary education in many of the fragile contexts that we're studying, the level of education is still low, even though there has been progress certainly since 2000, but this is one of the major concerns when it comes to the mediating effect in high fragile contexts. The interesting, so the usefulness of this data is also that you can in the projections consider the reciprocal effect of education on population development. These are two population pyramids for Niger in 2050, showing the impact of education, both in terms of qualifying the coming generations, with yellow here being primary education, red being no education, and blue being secondary and dark blue tertiary education. So not only is Niger, we're in the bottom version of the Niger population in 2050, following a fast track scenario, one that is much more educated, it's also a much smaller population as a result of education feeding back into lower fertility. So what we find in this study is that the provision of male secondary education is significantly reducing conflict, indeed the effect of youth bulges is restricted to low education domains, and youth bulges and low education are the interaction of youth bulges and low education is particularly strong in low and middle income countries. We're also seeing that rapid expansions in education do not elevate risks, which has been a major concern, and again that gender parity in education is actually something that lowers risk and net of the effect of male education on this relationship. Finally, just a couple of words on where we're going from here. The collaboration that we have now with the African School of Economics looking into ways that states and particularly states in South Africa and Africa can position themselves for the demographic window of opportunity that will arise over the decades to come, and particularly understanding the effects of education on realizing dividends, looking both at social, political and economic dividends, such as the potential driver of youth as drivers of changing norms and attitudes regarding social inclusion on the continent, the forms of political participation and inclusion, and also the impact of human capital expansion to youth inclusion in the economy in sub-Saharan Africa. So on that note, I see my time is out. Thank you very much.