Geodemography E-Book

Massimo Livi Bacci

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 200

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

The last hundred years have witnessed the ongoing decline of Europe’s population and the explosion of Africa’s, major changes in migratory flows, significant variations in fertility levels across different countries and ethnic groups and the dizzying growth of large metropolises. These changes alter and sometimes disrupt relations between societies, states and regions of the world and influence political choices, with variable and often unpredictable force and speed. Past and current crises, such as the difficulties faced by governments seeking to control immigration and to manage tensions between religious and ethnic communities, now appear as the inevitable consequence of these demographic changes.

Geodemography – the study of how population dynamics influence societies, states and regions and affect the relations between them, over time and throughout the world – can help us to understand these trends. Using a broad repertoire of exemplary cases drawn from recent world history, this book demonstrates that geodemography is an invaluable tool for gaining a deeper appreciation of the changing relations between societies and states and the great challenges we face today.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

A note from the author

Preface

Notes

1 A brief portrait of the world population

Eros and Thanatos

A change of pace

A geodemographic revolution

Beyond the numbers …

Space and the demographic issue

Notes

2 Limits, boundaries, borders

The definition of space

Texas and Sahrawi

Walls and barriers

Buffers and chains

Notes

3 Ethnicities

Ethnic groups and pluri-ethnic states

Migration, ethnicity and geopolitics

Rohingya, Tutsis and Hutus, and Haitians

The differential growth of ethnic groups

Notes

4 Migration as a weapon

Migration and relations between states

Abstract threats, well-founded fears

The great disorder: forced migration

From Mobutu to Baby Doc and Castro

Concrete threats

Intrusions

Notes

5 A case study: Palestine and Israel

Diaspora and geodemography

Arabs and Jews

Reproductive dynamics

Demographic numbers: sounding the alert, and false alarms

Only an internal matter, for now

Notes

6 Within the state: capitals and territory

The changing geography of the population

Apartheid

Cyclopean undertakings and pharaonic ambitions

Sisi-City

The cyclopes are no more

Notes

7 Geodemography and religion

Religion and demographic behaviours

Cuius regio, eius religio?

Islam in Europe

Midnight’s Children and the Great Partition

When will we have a black pope?

Notes

8 Environment, climate, water

Only one world

Space and population growth

First critical issue: deforestation

A second critical issue: populations amassing in coastal areas

A third critical issue: mega-cities, energy and pollution

A fourth critical issue: ‘The Wolf high up …’

Notes

Conclusion. The world of the future: the known and the unknown

Notes

Appendix. World population, estimates and projections, 1700–2100

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

A note from the author

Preface

Begin Reading

Conclusion. The world of the future: the known and the unknown

Appendix. World population, estimates and projections, 1700–2100

Index

End User License Agreement

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Geodemography

How Population Shapes the Relations Between States

MASSIMO LIVI-BACCI

Translated by David Broder

polity

Originally published in Italian as La geodemografia. Il peso dei popoli e i rapporti tra stati © 2024 by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna

This English translation © Polity Press, 2026

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche

Via Val d’Aposa 7 – 40123 Bologna – Italywww.seps.it – [email protected]

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6788-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2025940164

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

A note from the author

For some years now, I have taken a growing interest in the relations between demography and politics. Various observations on this theme appear in my books published by il Mulino over the last decade, as well as in some more scattered texts. I have also written about these questions for Neodemos (www.neodemos.info) and for Limesonline (www.limesonline.com). Since 2018, I have also been editing an annual ebook for Neodemos entitled Geodemografia, which contains the various online articles related to this subject. The latest edition was published in 2023. I would like to thank Gianfranco Linzi, the editor-in-chief of Gnosis, for allowing me to reproduce part of my article ‘Lo spazio e la sua antropizzazione’, which was published in its issue 2 of 2023.

When it comes to illicit financial schemes, there is a crime of ‘self-laundering’. If there were a similar offence for the re-use of one’s own texts, I would be guilty as charged — and the evidence would be overwhelming. However, I considered it useful to find a logical thread that could pull together ideas and considerations that I have developed at different points on the relationship between demography and geopolitics. The result is a kind of minestrone that ought to be more appetizing than its individual ingredients, if it has been prepared as it should be. I hope that I have succeeded in this regard.

My special thanks to Gustavo De Santis, Sergio Della Pergola, Pietro Marcenaro and Giovanni Seminara, all of them dear friends and attentive readers, who have given me valuable advice, for which I am most grateful.

Massimo Livi-Bacci Florence–Bolgheri, April–September 2023

Preface

In recent decades, we have rediscovered a reality that humans have known since time immemorial. We have understood that we all live in one world, and that anything that happens at any given point – be it material or immaterial – will have repercussions elsewhere around the globe, too. For the natural sciences, this has always been a self-evident fact; for the humanities, this truth is not always so obvious, and must be backed up by specific proofs. There have always been societies that have sought to isolate themselves from others, out of the illusion that they can avoid, or at least cushion, the knock-on effects of what is happening elsewhere. But the interconnection between cultures, between economies and between individuals wraps the planet in a web of ever-denser meshes, whose patterns are woven with ever-stronger threads, pulled tighter by both natural and social forces. Crucially, these forces do not act independently of each other. This is well illustrated both by contemporary climate change, which is mainly humandriven, and by the mechanisms that allowed the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book explores the effects that demographic changes have on the relations between the different regions and countries of the world, as seen through the lens of political geodemography, or what may simply be called geodemography. I am not announcing the creation of a new discipline – the human sciences are quite fragmented enough already. What geodemography offers is a perspective, a way of considering populations, and the phenomena that condition their development, in terms of their consequences for (especially international) politics. For examples of this, we need only think of the great revolution of the last century, with the constant fall in Europe’s relative demographic weight and the explosion of Africa’s; of the changes in the direction, volume and characteristics of migration patterns; of the widely varying reproductivity levels of different countries and ethnic groups; or of the rapid growth of large urban centres. These phenomena all strain the relations between the states and regions of the world, shaking up old balances and creating different ones. They influence political choices, with a speed and force that are variable and often unpredictable. Geodemography, which examines these phenomena, offers an aid to the study of geopolitics and thus contributes to a better understanding of the relations between countries and of their future prospects. When scholars of geopolitics are asked to define their discipline, even they run into trouble; one of the most widely regarded authors tells us that ‘geopolitics is not science: it has no laws, no faculties of prediction’.1 It is not science, perhaps, because its objectives are too broad and indeterminate. Still, this is also true of most studies in the humanities.

The theoretical forebears of the discipline of geopolitics, which from the outset also addressed demographic issues, had troubling political implications, too. The demographic question, and the problem of a country’s size, has been used throughout history as a weapon, in support of ideologies and the policies that they inspire. The classic example is the degeneration of the concept of ‘living space’ or Lebensraum. It was coined by Friedrich Ratzel, an anthropologist and geographer who breathed in the evolutionist and positivist climate of the late nineteenth century. In its most articulate form, Ratzel’s theory postulates the state as a biological organism that is born, grows, expands and then declines. This development takes place in relation to the available space, but if this is insufficient, then a pressure will emerge that will push the state to expand beyond its existing political borders. The concept of Lebensraum was politically useful in explaining German unification and in justifying its expansion, at that point more directed towards the southern hemisphere than within Europe itself. The aim: to build up the colonial empire that Germany considered necessary if it was to compete with France and Great Britain for European supremacy. The amount and speed of a population’s expansion are thus essential variables in Ratzel’s paradigm, in harmony with the culture of his time and the imperialist spirit that reigned in all the great powers. This paradigm dealt with states, their borders and their possible inadequacy in the face of the biological development of populations. It contained potentially explosive elements when wielded by malicious leaders, as in the 1930s in the dismal cases of Germany, Italy and, to some extent, the Soviet Union. But it must be said that, before this happened, the concept of living space, even if conjugated in other terms, was widespread in Europe far beyond the German-speaking countries alone. It provided a theoretical justification for colonial expansionism, for Benito Mussolini’s ideology of population growth and for Stalinism (notwithstanding the vast excess of ‘living space’ that the USSR had already). It should be added that the backdrop to this, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a deep-seated belief in the superiority of the European, Caucasian, white-skinned peoples over all others, whereby these groups were considered to have an almost innate right to take over whatever spaces served their development. This conviction would die hard, and today translates into hostility to ethnic mixing and the bogeyman of the ‘great replacement’.

The origins of geopolitics, its links with illiberal or totalitarian doctrines and its underlying determinism plunged the discipline into a period of slumber, even though the issues it grappled with were more alive than ever. Over the last two or three decades, it has begun to re-emerge.

This book does not aspire to define a new discipline of geodemography. Rather, it seeks to shed light on the connections between population dynamics, the actions of the various geopolitical actors, the relations between states and power struggles. Its humble ambition is to be useful for the study of geopolitics. Even if, some scholars admit, this is not a ‘science’, it still needs solid bricks to build with.

Notes

1.

Lucio Caracciolo, ‘Cos’è la geopolitica e perché va di moda’,

Limesonline

, 7 February 2018.

1A brief portrait of the world population

Eros and Thanatos

For millennia, global demographic changes were slow and gradual, contained by the deep, instinctual forces that governed human numbers and their dynamics. The reproductive instinct, driven by Eros, and the survival instinct, or rather the deadly threat to it from Thanatos, balanced each other out. This kept population numbers relatively stable. To stick with this metaphor: the poverty of resources and of knowledge meant that humans had few means of keeping Thanatos at bay, and mortality hovered at very high levels. Countering the violence of Thanatos was the reproductive instinct, namely Eros, and the many births resulting from the natural capacity for reproduction.1 Yet, there was a further complicating factor, as the peoples of the past were capable (within certain limits) of governing their instincts. Sufficient nourishment, shrewd choices as to their living environment, natural remedies and cures that had at least some effectiveness could each be useful aids to their survival instinct. However, mortality remained at very high levels: there are no known cases of populations whose longevity – measured by life expectancy at birth – consistently surpassed age thirty-five.

The reproductive instinct could also be moderated by rules, behaviour and actions, and this freed it, in part, from the grip of purely natural forces. Exclusion from marriage or reproductive union through taboos and customs (celibacy, higher or lower age at marriage); the physical separation of spouses; and practices for terminating pregnancies could each limit humans’ reproductive capacity and birth rates. But not by much: detailed studies by demographers have shown that there is little evidence of the populations of yesteryear using voluntary birth control. The average number of children per woman (who lived through the entire reproductive cycle) fell below five only in exceptional cases. Given these limits, and considering the long period in question, population growth was extremely slow. If we set the beginnings of agriculture at 10,000 years ago and estimate that the planet had 10 million inhabitants at that time, then to reach 1 billion people (which happened in around 1800), the world population grew, on average, at the glacial rate of five people per 10,000 inhabitants a year. This is some twenty times slower than the current rate.

A change of pace

Over the eighteenth century, the slow-growth demography reliant on force of instinct began to give way to a controlled demography. The barriers posed by the poverty of resources and knowledge were broken down, thanks to the ‘arrow’ of development in all fields from culture to the economy, science and technology. Mortality declined, preparing the conditions for a subsequent decrease in fertility, via the spread of voluntary birth control. In this first phase, demographic growth accelerated as mortality fell and birth rates remained unchanged. However, such a widening gap between births and deaths was not sustainable for long. Development factors pressed for a lowering of birth numbers through voluntary birth control, whose spread was increasingly less restrained by religious, cultural or institutional considerations. Indeed, if more children were surviving, why have so many of them?

The result of all this: gradually, births and deaths converged, and the growth rate fell to minimal or even negative levels; life expectancy approached eighty years, and fertility was reduced to two children per woman on average, or fewer. This process was slow, gradual and centuries-long: specialists call it the ‘demographic transition’. This process developed along a steep incline, first in the rich countries, then in the less developed ones; first in the cities, then in the countryside; first among the well-off and educated classes, then among the poor and less-educated ones. To simplify things further, in the global North the demographic transition unfolded between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth; in the global South it began in the middle of the twentieth century, and while in some regions it is now complete (e.g. in South-East Asia and large parts of Latin America), in others (sub-Saharan Africa) it is still in its early stages.

Here, we have offered an initial summary of the developments in the planet’s demography, as it slowly reached 1 billion inhabitants at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then accelerated its rate of population growth. But let’s add a few numerical details to this picture. Towards the end of World War I, the population had doubled to 2 billion, rising to 4 billion in 1974, shortly after the moon landing, and then doubling for the third time, to 8 billion, by 2022.2 The speed of population growth has varied: 0.4 per cent per year around 1800, 0.7 per cent around 1900, reaching 2 per cent in the 1960s, and gradually falling below 1 per cent in recent years. However, as already mentioned, the countries and regions of the world do not travel at the same pace: the current 1 per cent growth rate is an averaging out of highly dissimilar situations, depending on what stage of the transition process they are going through. To better grasp this, it’s worth considering the world’s six most populous countries (which total over 40 per cent of the world population) and looking at their current growth rates (for 2022) according to United Nations estimates. These are, from slowest to fastest: 0 per cent for China, 0.5 per cent for the United States, 0.6 per cent for Indonesia, 0.7 per cent for India, 2 per cent for Pakistan and 2.4 per cent for Nigeria. By comparison, the figure for the planet as a whole is 0.8 per cent.

Thus the growth rates range from a stationary China to a high-speed Nigeria, whose population will double in under thirty years if it does not slow things down.

A geodemographic revolution

As we have seen, the size of groups, nation-states and world regions changes at quite different speeds, but on average much faster than the world that existed before the nineteenth century. So, there is a constant shifting in the relative population numbers of different states; and this parameter is neither neutral nor negligible in the play of international relations. Since the mid-twentieth century, the world’s population has been in a maximum ‘stress’ situation, not only because of accelerated growth, but also because of the ‘coexistence’ of populations in different phases of their demographic transition and post-transition:3 some are in sharp decline, while others are growing rapidly. It is, therefore, useful to get an overview of the ‘macrogeography’ of human population, and of the ways it changes. This is, indeed, an indispensable canvas for evaluating certain relations between states. To this end, let’s extend the period under consideration back to 1700 – a time when demography reliant on instincts still ruled the roost – and forward to 2050, a date a quarter of a century away, but not so far away as to make the prediction purely arbitrary.

Between 1700 and 2050, the geography of human population changes profoundly, with considerable variations in the relative weight of the different continents, regional areas and countries as part of the world total.4 We can note surprising macroscopic changes such as the rise of China’s importance up to 1800 (when it represented 36.6 per cent of the world population) and its subsequent gradual decline, accelerated in the final fifty-year period (14.4 per cent in 2050); or the rise of Europe, in 1900 home to one-quarter of the world’s population, a share which rapidly falls to a modest one-twelfth in 2050. Africa contained more than one-sixth of the world’s population in 1700, but fell to half this by 1900, only to ‘boom’ to reach one-quarter by 2050. Less than 1 per cent of the world’s population lived on the North American continent in 1700, a share that increased tenfold by 1950, only to decline slowly over the next century. These few examples alone confirm the vast change in the distribution of humanity across the planet over the centuries.

Let’s now turn to the contemporary era, the time frame 1950–2050. Here, we can see the dynamics of populations divided by the deep fault line that separates the rich and advanced global North from the poor and late-developing global South. The former have made the demographic transition already, whereas the latter are halfway along. Still, the demographic picture is extraordinarily blurred, as the following examples show. Southern Europe had a population more than double that of North Africa in 1950 but will be almost two-thirds smaller than it in 2050; Russia was three times more populous than Pakistan in 1950 but will count barely one-third as many people by 2050; Japan started with a population almost five times that of the Philippines, but by the middle of this century the Japanese will be one-third fewer in number than Filipinos. The economic divide, which has separated the North from the South for centuries, deepening over the last hundred years, is overlaid by the growing disparity in the mass of human numbers populating these two parts of the world. The course of future developments, and their outcomes, is hard to predict.

To stick to numerical considerations, when looking at the prospects for the next quarter-century, it is worth highlighting the dynamics of the world’s major ‘competitors’. For the United States, a period of sustained growth is still expected until the midpoint of the century (+11 per cent), whereas Russia faces decline (–8 per cent). These are important but not revolutionary changes, although they will affect the ageing process, productivity and other social issues that we will skip past here. However, Russia is experiencing a kind of dual demographic distress. Its first source is particular to the present moment, and is owed to the severe damage caused by the war in Ukraine and the extensive recruitment required by a war of attrition (from 2022 onwards). The second strain, which dates to the time of Peter the Great, concerns the state’s need to populate and make its presence felt across its vast territory. There is likewise a divergence between the two great pools of human beings in China and India: the former is on a downward trend (–8 per cent), whereas the latter is still growing vigorously (+18 per cent).

Beyond the numbers …

Before we continue, it is worth thinking about the possible social and political implications of demographic numbers and their variations. We might ask how much weight the demographic factor has in determining the influence that one country or region has on neighbouring, perhaps competing ones, and what impact it has on different geopolitical scenarios. It probably counts for little or nothing with regard to