Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future

Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial science history Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 379 - 410
Main Authors Jewell, Nicholas P., Spagat, Michael, Jewell, Britta L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.09.2018
Subjects
Accounting
Casualties
Civil war
Civilians
Crowdsourcing
Data collection
Epidemiology
Famine
Historians
Human rights
Mortality
Motivation
Quantitative analysis
Research Article
Social research
World War I
World War II
United States > US
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Summary:Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to these questions with illustrative comments on the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, and other conflicts. We provide an overview of several accounting methodologies including excess mortality, epidemiologic surveys, direct and indirect counts, multiple list estimation, and crowdsourcing. We reflect on the evolution toward modern approaches to casualty assessments, permitted by both a deeper understanding of human rights and by contemporaneous technological advances in data collection techniques. Our goal is to introduce several areas of research that deserve attention from social science historians and statisticians.
ISSN:0145-5532
1527-8034
DOI:10.1017/ssh.2018.9