Addressing Violence by Recording the Casualties of Conflict: A Study of 40 Practitioners

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND TO THIS PAPER This paper focuses on casualty recording: the attempted comprehensive, systematic and continuous documentation of individual conflict deaths or the incidents in which these occur, as a way of understanding and addressing conflict violence. The paper proposes that there is a broad field of casualty recording, made up of a connected range of different approaches to this kind of documentation, which can operate both during and post conflict for the benefit of conflict-affected communities. This range of approaches produces information that can serve a variety of purposes, from academic analysis and the development of evidence-based violence reduction policies, to supporting justice and accountability procedures. The information and analysis in this paper is drawn from a survey of 40 casualty recorders, mainly civil-society based, who Oxford Research Group (ORG) interviewed about their work in 2011.