Bodies count: the politics and practices of war and violent death data

Abstract

In discussions of conflict, war and political violence, dead bodies count. Although the politics and practices associated with the collection of violent-death data are seldom subject to critical examination, they are crucial to how scholars and practitioners think about how and why conflict and violence erupt. Knowledge about conflict deaths – the who, what, where, when, why and how – is a form of expertise, created, disseminated and used by different agents. This article highlights the ways in which body counts are deployed as social facts and forms of knowledge that are used to shape and influence policies and practices associated with armed conflict. It traces the way in which conflict-death data emerged, and then examines critically some of the practices and assumptions of data collection to shed light on how claims to expertise are enacted and on how the public arena connects (or not) with scholarly conflict expertise.

The subversive practice of counting bodies: Documenting violence and conflict in rural Brazil

“…Body counts are a crucial aspect of so‐called ‘traditional’ conflicts (e.g., war), yet remain largely overlooked by critical scholars (Krause, 2017) despite such information being key in how different groups create and frame narratives, exercise power, and govern (Stepputat, 2018). The CPT case is unique in that by counting bodies, they have been able to frame supposedly occasional violence in terms of an actual existing conflict initially not recognised as such to orient concrete social action.…”

Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)

“…Goodale contextualizes Merry's research in the growing importance in the post-Cold War era of statistical evaluation within global policy and academia when "the promotion of international human rights and international justice was coupled with monitoring, classification, and ranking" (Goodale 2024). Echoing calls for an ethics of numbers in governance and policy (Espeland and Stevens 2008;Krause 2017;Willis 2017;Firchow 2018;Saltelli and Di Fiore 2020;Littoz-Monnet and Uribe 2023), he stresses the importance of her research and criticism of commensurability in relation to neoliberalization and the rise of "audit culture" and its demand for the efficiency provided by quantitative data in what he describes as an "ideology of commensurability," ultimately arguing for a more contextualized approach.…”