Research Director of the Institute National d’Etudes Demographiques (INED) in Paris. Youssef Courbage is an expert in the field of relationship between demography and politics, principally in Arab and Muslim countries. Courbage was the Scientific Director of the French Institute of the Near East in Beirut and is the author of around three hundred and fifty publications, books, articles, reports and teaching material. Together with Emmanuel Todd he added a new dimension to the ongoing debate over the clash of civilizations through predicting the modernization of the Islamic World in their book 'Le rendez-vous des civilizations'.