Accounting for Death in War: Separating Fact from Fiction

Understand how war deaths are counted

Calculating the number of deaths during a war is a difficult, but necessary, task - having accurate information is crucial for political and societal debates and decisions.

On this course you will explore the methods currently used to account for war deaths and then apply these methods to particular wars. Along the way you will debunk some widely circulated war-death claims. You will focus mainly on direct, violent deaths but will also cover some estimates of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by war.

This course is for anyone interested in war, history and politics and/or the use and abuse of numbers and statistics. You don’t need an advanced knowledge of mathematics.

This course is for anyone interested in war, history and politics and/or the use and abuse of numbers and statistics. You don’t need an advanced knowledge of mathematics.

• Explain the main methods used to account for war deaths
• Describe the state of war-death knowledge for several modern wars, including some that have been misrepresented by faulty statistics
• Evaluate the quality of war-death numbers and debate their strengths and weaknesses
• Calculate war-death estimates from some basic pieces of information