Accounting for Civilian Casualties: From the Past to the Future

Abstract

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.

Decline of war or end of positive check? Analysis of change in war size distribution between 1816-2007

“…Splitting the data at year t information from years t ≤ t is used to specify parameters of the prior distributionp( θ Naturally the reported number of people killed by a particular war comes with a degree of uncertainty -in addition to other biases previously discussed; therefore the war sizes are log-transformed to the base 10 (Richardson, 1948) and the data is split using a relatively small number of cut-off points. The data is unlikely to be fully accurate given the issues measuring war-related mortality (Østerud, 2008;Spagat et al, 2009;Hacker, 2011;Jewell et al, 2018).…”

Combining war damages accounting and accounting for the natural world with social-organisational repercussions

“…Among the possible accounting methods to be used for war costs, the following are proposed: accounting for accidental costs, the value of life, psychological hidden costs, opportunity costs, costs of war on victims and relatives, costs of death itself, costs related to destruction and disease, and more generally social costs. Jewell et al (2018) focus on the ability of accounting to assess the position of the troops, identify the economic aspects related to the damages endured, identify and quantify whom and how much to compensate, and quantify the value of sick or dead people through the post-conflict compensation to surviving family members and the pensions for amputees or survivors. Jewell et al (2018) clarify that there is a greater difficulty to account for the damages produced by the enemy with respect to one's own army.…”

Severe Prenatal Shocks and Adolescent Health: Evidence from the Dutch Hunger Winter

“…Third, we extract from the CBS registries information on the number of civilian deaths from war-related causes. 13 Deaths due to warfare are all deaths classified with code "197 -Deaths of civilians due to operations of war" (within the main category "XVII -Violent or Accidental Deaths") according to the International List of Causes of Death, Revision 5 (ICD-5) of 1938 (CBS, 1935(CBS, -1947; this classification allows to better separate direct and indirect mortality from the war (Jewell et al, 2018). These civilian deaths were in part the result of bombings by the Allied Forces (Ekamper, 2020).…”