This blog is intended to go along with Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, by John R. Weeks, published by Cengage Learning. The latest edition is the 13th (it will be out in January 2020), but this blog is meant to complement any edition of the book by showing the way in which demographic issues are regularly in the news.

You can download an iPhone app for the 13th edition from the App Store (search for Weeks Population).

If you are a user of my textbook and would like to suggest a blog post idea, please email me at: john.weeks@sdsu.edu

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Political Geography on Election Night in America

It is not only those of us in the U.S. who are anxiously awaiting today's election results. The French paper, La Croix, for example, interviewed my son, Greg Weeks, who is Chair of the Political Science Department at UNC, Charlotte, and whose thought it is (in concert with many others) that Republican control of both the House and Senate will lead to two years of paralysis between now and the next Presidential election. That is unlikely to be good for anyone in the world, except perhaps for people bent on undermining modern nation-states. On that score, I was very interested to see that La Croix has a set of interactive maps on its website showing, among other things, the major Islamist armies currently active in the world (see below).



And it is certainly no coincidence that these are among the areas projected by the UN Population Division to be growing the most quickly between now and the middle of this century:



1 comment:

  1. I agree. This is a terrible time for the political process to get bogged down ... in any country, let alone the USA. When I was a young man, I envisioned this world of today to be MORE capable of making excellent decisions .. NOT less!

    Yet oddly enough, our national decision-making processes are more fractured and confused than in the past. Partly it is due to greed (the pressure from businesses to otain short-term profits), partly due to political rivalry (esp. the ability to use and manipulate the media), and partly due to "information swamping" (the availability of copious amounts of data over the Internet). But the stark reality .. is that our key decision-making prcocesses are more short-term and "crisis oriented" than at any time in the past.

    Go figure??!!

    Pete, Redondo Beach

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