Counting civilian casualties: an introduction to recording and estimating nonmilitary deaths in conflict

by Aronson, Jay D. Fischhoff, Baruch Seybolt, Taylor B.

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Title Statements

Full title :Counting civilian casualties : an introduction to recording and estimating nonmilitary deaths in conflict / edited by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff.

Summary

A popular myth emerged in the late 1990s: in 1900, wars killed one civilian for every eight soldiers, while contemporary wars were killing eight civilians for every one soldier. The neat reversal of numbers was memorable, and academic publications and UN documents regularly cited it. The more it was cited, the more trusted it became. In fact, however, subsequent research found no empirical evidence for the idea that the ratio of civilians to soldiers killed in war has changed dramatically. But while the ratios may not have changed, the political significance of civilian casualties has risen tremendously. Over the past century, civilians in war have gone from having no particular rights to having legal protections and rights that begin to rival those accorded to states. The concern for civilians in conflict has become so strong that governments occasionally undertake humanitarian interventions, at great risk and substantial cost, to protect strangers in distant lands. I n the early 1990s, the UN Security Council authorized military interventions to help feed and protect civilians in the Kurdish area of Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. And in May 2011 , Barack Obama 's National Security Advisor explained the United States' decision to support NATO's military intervention in these terms "When the president made this decision, there was an immediate threat to 700,000 Libyan civilians in the town of Benghazi. We've had a success here in terms of being able to protect those civilians --

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2013.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Oxford University Press
Place of Publication:New York
Language:eng
Publication Date:2013.

The Physical Object

Description:xix, 310 pages : : illustrations ; : 24 cm.

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9780199977307, 0199977305, 0199977313, 9780199977314
oclc:ocn859552398
Dewey Decimal:355.4

Who counts? -- Introduction / Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff -- Significant numbers: civilian casualties and strategic peacebuilding / Taylor B. Seybolt -- The politics of civilian casualty counts / Jay D. Aronson -- Recording violence: incident-based data -- Iraq body count: a case study in the uses of incident-based conflict casualty data aggregate conflict casualty data / John Sloboda, Hamit Dardagan, Michael Spagat, and Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks -- A matter of convenience: challenges of non-random data in analyzing -- Human rights violations in Peru and Sierra Leone / Todd Landman and Anita Gohdes -- Estimating violence: surveys -- Using surveys to estimate casualties post-conflict: developments for the developing world / Jana Asher -- Collecting data on violence: scientific challenges and ethnographic solutions / Meghan Foster Lynch -- Estimating violence: multiple-systems estimation -- Combining found data and surveys to measure conflict mortality / Jeff Klingner and Romesh Silva -- Multiple-systems estimation techniques for estimating casualties in armed conflicts / Daniel Manrique-Vallier, Megan E. Price, and Anita Gohdes -- Mixed methods -- MSE and …

Subjects

Case studies Civilian war casualties Civilian war casualties -- Case studies Civilian war casualties -- Statistics Civilians in war Civilians in war -- Case studies Guerre -- Études de cas. -- Participati… Guerre civile -- Études de cas. -- Pert… Guerre civile -- Statistiques. -- Pertes Statistics