Event

The Browne Center for International Politics and Perry World House host Monica Toft, University of Oxford for a talk entitled "Death by Demography: Population Shifts and State Collapse."

Abstract: Every day the news is littered with stories about the implications of profound demographic shifts faced by the world's states and regions. From the end of China's one-child policy, to concern about an aging Europe and a quickly urbanizing Africa, understanding of the broader dynamics at play is woefully underdeveloped. Academics seem reluctant to pursue a demographic line of inquiry for fear of not having a direct, causal story to tell. Policymakers, working under short time frames, often fail to appreciate the longer-term consequences of natural shifts or state-driven demographic engineering until it is too late. What remains is a series of conjectures driven by idealogy, emotion and ignorance. 

Toft's research on the political dimensions of demographic dynamics in key states during critical historical periods aims to facilitate a better understanding of demographic politics— one that is both theoretically and practically informative.

Bio: Monica Duffy Toft is Professor of Government and Public Policy. She joined Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government after having taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School for over a decade. She was educated at the University of Chicago (MA and PhD in political science) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (BA in political science and Slavic languages and literature, summa cum laude). Prior to college, she spent four years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist. Professor Toft is a Global Scholar of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board and the Political Instability Task Force. In 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence. Most recently she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Norway and is currently on sabbatical at Princeton University as the World Politics Fellow. Professor Toft’s areas of research include: international security, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars and political demography. In addition to publishing numerous scholarly articles and policy pieces on global politics and international security, her most recent books include Population Change and National Security (Oxford, 2012), Rethinking Religion in World Affairs (Oxford, 2012), God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (Norton, 2011) and Securing the Peace (Princeton, 2010).