The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. What: state involvement and one-sided violenceĪcross the various sources there three broad kinds of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the Conflict Catalogue do come out the highest. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, many factors contribute to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.īrecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. While indirect deaths represent a substantial proportion of the social costs of conflict, there is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts. The Conflict Catalogue series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations. The Correlates of War series includes military personnel that died from diseases ‘contracted in the war theatre’. The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities.
This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence – for instance those from gunshot or explosions – a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are indirect, due to disease, starvation or exposure. As we would expect then, the Correlates of War figures are generally lower than the others. The Correlates of War series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture – at least to some extent – civilian deaths too.
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