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." Counting Civilian Casualties aims to promote open
scientific dialogue by high lighting the strengths and weaknesses
of the most commonly used casualty recording and estimation
techniques in an understandable format. Its thirteen chapters, each
authoritative but accessible to nonspecialists, explore a variety
of approaches, from direct recording to statistical estimation and
sampling, to collecting data on civilian deaths caused by conflict.
The contributors also discuss their respective advantages and
disadvantages, and analyze how figures are used (and misused) by
governments, rebels, human rights advocates, war crimes tribunals,
and others. In addition to providing analysts with a broad range of
tools to produce accurate data, this will be an in valuable
resource for policymakers, military officials, jou rnalists, human
rights activists, courts, and ordinary people who want to be more
informed-and skeptical-consumers of casualty counts.
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