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General Introduction: Armed Conflicts and the Body Count: An Issue for Population Studies and Development

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Violence, Statistics, and the Politics of Accounting for the Dead

Part of the book series: Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development ((DTSD,volume 4))

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Abstract

Mortality is an important indicator of development and population change. Statistically, it serves many purposes, for instance in determining life expectancy and calculating the human development index. In times of crisis, more precisely, excess mortality is a key indicator to assess both the impact of a disaster and basic needs for reconstruction. In case of war, it can help alert the international community to the necessity to provide relief and, sometimes, send troops to enforce peace. Humanitarian workers also use the statistics of excess mortality to evaluate their performance. Meanwhile, the military and jurists rely on the body count of victims to declare “war” or “peace”. And policy makers and aid practitioners who link development to human security need to know how many people died in order to know how many still live.

To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it.

(Pinker and Mack 2014)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the UK during World War One, for instance, better welfare for pregnant women and the increasing use of dried milk, which was less likely to carry the tubercle bacillus, reduced infant mortality while stricter controls on liquor availability decreased the incidence of alcoholism (Winter 1977).

  2. 2.

    See for instance Marchal and Messiant (2002, pp. 13–23) and Pérouse de Montclos (2006, pp. 151–7).

  3. 3.

    See for instance Héran (2014, pp. 1–4).

  4. 4.

    See Kaplan (2000, p. 198) and Kaldor (1999, p. 192). For an economic version of this theory, see Collier (2000). For the cultural version, see Huntington (1996, p. 367).

  5. 5.

    Steven Pinker’s views on chaos in developing countries might in fact reflect the position of his main source of inspiration, the famous sociologist Norbert Elias, who taught in Ghana during two years and who, according to Jack Goody (2003), considered pre-colonial Africa as primitive.

  6. 6.

    The percentage is probably nearer to 50 %. See Bezbakh (2014, p. 7).

  7. 7.

    For instance, it is estimated that 400,000 soldiers of Napoleon died because of the winter and typhus during their retreat from Russia . Likewise, most of the 618,000 military victims of the secession war in the United State s died because they fell sick. See Talty (2009) and Vinovskis (1989).

  8. 8.

    The bodycount of these civilian victims was only done in the 1990s. See Hopquin (2014, p. 9).

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  1. Institut Français de Géopolitique (IFG), Université Paris 8, 2 rue de la Liberté, 93200, Saint-Denis, France

    Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos

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  1. Inst Français de Géopolitique (IFG), Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

    Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos

  2. Every Casualty Programme, Oxford Research Group, London, United Kingdom

    Elizabeth Minor

  3. Centre for Study of Political Violence, Jindal School of Intern Affairs, Sonepat, Haryana, India

    Samrat Sinha

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de Montclos, MA.P. (2016). General Introduction: Armed Conflicts and the Body Count: An Issue for Population Studies and Development. In: Pérouse de Montclos, MA., Minor, E., Sinha, S. (eds) Violence, Statistics, and the Politics of Accounting for the Dead. Demographic Transformation and Socio-Economic Development, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12036-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12036-2_1

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