Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation

In a much-cited recent article, Obermeyer, Murray, and Gakidou (2008a) examine estimates of wartime fatalities from injuries for thirteen countries. Their analysis poses a major challenge to the battle-death estimating methodology widely used by conflict researchers, engages with the controversy over whether war deaths have been increasing or decreasing in recent decades, and takes the debate over different approaches to battle-death estimation to a new level. In making their assessments, the authors compare war death reports extracted from World Health Organization (WHO) sibling survey data with the battle-death estimates for the same countries from the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). The analysis that leads to these conclusions is not compelling, however. Thus, while the authors argue that the PRIO estimates are too low by a factor of three, their comparison fails to compare like with like. Their assertion that there is " no evidence " to support the PRIO finding that war deaths have recently declined also fails. They ignore war-trend data for the periods after 1994 and before 1955, base their time trends on extrapolations from a biased convenience sample of only thirteen countries, and rely on an estimated constant that is statistically insignificant. Introduction Estimating war deaths can be a highly contentious exercise as the sharply polarized debates over fatality totals in postinvasion Iraq remind us. 1 Controversy arises in part because conflict death tolls have been calculated using very different methodologies and these have produced fatality estimates that are sometimes startlingly different. There are two main methodological approaches to estimating war deaths; one relies on collating and recording reports of war fatalities from a wide variety of sources, while the other relies on estimates derived from retrospective mortality surveys. 2 Debate over the rival merits of the two approaches was taken to a new stage in 2008 with the publication in the British Medical Journal of " Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia " by Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou (henceforth, OMG). Prior to this article being published, the debate had focused on sharply differing fatality estimates in single conflicts, notably Iraq (see below), but also Darfur (U.S. General Accounting Office, 2006). OMG's contribution has been to compare survey-based wartime fatality estimates from thirteen countries with estimates of battle-deaths that are based on reported deaths from a variety of sources for the same countries in the same years …