• youth bulge
• political instability
• democratization
• political transitions

The wave of protests that, starting from the end of 2010, hit some countries in the Middle- East North-Africa region, leading to the fall of long-standing autocratic regimes and referred to as the Arab Spring, has renewed the interests of researchers on youth bulges. The youth bulge theory links the demographic transition to political instability, by asserting that countries characterized by a particularly young population tend to be more vulnerable to political violence. The aim of the thesis is to test empirically this hypothesis on a sample of 160 countries in the post-World War II period. For this purpose, we adopt an econometric strategy alternative to the one prevailing in the literature on the determinants of civil conflicts: we employ a simple linear regression model which accounts for country and time fixed effects.