FutureLearn

Accounting for Death in War: Separating Fact from Fiction (FutureLearn)

Offered by Royal Holloway, University of London, Every Casualty Counts,
Accounting for Death in War: Separating Fact from Fiction (FutureLearn)

Discover the main methods used to account for war deaths, how they've been used and practice using them yourself. 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.

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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.
What topics will you cover?

  • Memorializing people who people who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians
  • The idea of casualty recording; listing war dead name-by-name or event-by-event with details about each case
  • Using statistical methods to estimate the total number of war deaths and breakdowns by categories
  • Estimating the number of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by war
  • Applications to air strikes and explosive violence worldwide and to wars in Kosovo, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond

What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

  • 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
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