My colleague Mike Spagat has a new paper out today in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. In they paper the authors call into question the use of surveys to estimate the death totals from conflict. The press release for the JCR paper has this to say;
The online Appendix to the Journal of Conflict Resolution study further argues that small surveys are inappropriate instruments for measuring violent deaths, because most civil wars today tend to concentrate in a few geographically localized areas. In these circumstances cluster surveys tend either to fail to detect any war deaths or––when they do––overestimate their impact by a wide margin.
The Appendix also reveals the extent to which the WHO surveys repeatedly fail to detect violent war deaths in countries where the PRIO dataset––which supposedly undercounts fatalities––reports many battle deaths. In the case of the Philippines, for example, the WHO surveys failed to find any violent war deaths during two periods in which the PRIO dataset reports at least 70,000 battle deaths.
The paper by Spagat et al. is a critique on the methodology employed by the recent BMJ paper by Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou. The press release for the BMJ paper claimed that
“Globally, war has killed three times more people than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support claims of a recent decline in war deaths.”
However Spagat et al. argue that the authors of the BMJ article fail to prove either claim and that their article contains many methodological and factual errors. The takeaway message here is that when violence is non-uniformly distributed in either space, size or timing then the standard methods use by surveys like the BMJ to count it will always provide a massive over estimate or massive underestimate in the death tolls.
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