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This chapter examines civilian casualties at coalition checkpoints in Afghanistan and Iraq, focusing on the decision to use lethal force against individuals considered to be hostile. Drawing on the testimony of American soldiers, this chapter argues that the decision to use lethal force can be seen as an affective judgement, with soldiers often resorting to ‘muscle memory’ as they sought to identify potential threats amidst the chaos and confusion of war. It will argue that these affective judgements do not occur within a cultural vacuum but are animated and informed by a set of background assumptions that mark certain populations as dangerous, threatening and hostile before they even arrive on the scene. To understand what made civilians so vulnerable to death and injury at coalition checkpoints, it will be necessary to inquire into the affective schemes of intelligibility that render certain lives disposable and certain bodies profoundly injurable in war.

The preparation for and waging of war is a social system entailing structural requirements and effects, as well as having implications for individual agency. The chapter makes a short detour to philosophy and organization theory to show that organizations can be and are imperfect moral agents, and that the U.S. military is a moral agent. Because most scholarly work on moral agency focuses on individuals, the chapter necessarily breaks new ground by integrating organization theory with a theory of imperfect moral agency. While some measures for minimizing civilian harm were in place at the start of these wars, it arguably took the military a long time and many civilians killed to see enormous political and strategic costs of collateral damage, and to recognize that its procedures could be and should be changed. Once recognized, however, commanders and the services focused on developing and improving means to minimize collateral damage. Rules of engagement were modified, and algorithms, weapons, operations, and ethics training were improved to meet the requirement for civilian protection. Throughout the wars the U.S. military has acted as an imperfect moral agent, and its gradual recognition of the problem of collateral damage, its initial ad hoc responses to the problem, and the gradual institutionalization of a program of civilian casualty mitigation illustrates a cycle of moral agency and a process of organizational learning. This process has been, with exceptions, mostly positive. But the chapter also shows where and how the U.S. military could further act to reduce systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage.

Discusses the aims and the conduct of the NATO bombing campaign against the Yugoslavia; the refugee crisis and civilian casualties of the campaign; and the diplomatic events leading to the final peace agreement. The chapter argues that the NATO campaign did not itself provoke Serbian military's attacks on Kosovo civilians, but that the intervention and the removal of ground monitors may have created an internal environment that made Belgrade government's cleansing operation feasible. The chapter concludes that the intervention failed to achieve its avowed aim of preventing massive ethnic cleansing, that the Kosovar Albanian population had to endure tremendous suffering before finally achieving their freedom and that Milosevic remained in power, however, as an indicted war criminal.

This chapter reviews the uses, merits, and limitations of incident-based casualty data, using the Iraq Body Count (IBC) database as an example. It outlines the characteristics, methods, and sources of IBC’s data. Examples are given of how data have been used to improve understanding of the effects of armed conflict on civilians, to commemorate individual deaths, and to advocate for civilian protection. The chapter discusses how IBC compares against other sources of information on violent deaths in Iraq, and assesses the strengths and limitations of using media-derived and incident-based data. It concludes by outlining improvements that could be made in the incident-based recording of civilian casualties in order to support better protection of civilians in armed conflict.

Although the number of civilians killed by drone strikes has lessened in recent years, a significant discrepancy exists between public estimates of drone strike casualties and those acknowledged by the US government. The chapter seeks to establish the reasons behind these contradictory figures, taking the case of Pakistan as an example. The author presents information from a visit to South Waziristan and interviews with local residents in the village of Sara Rhoga. Drone strikes there in 2009 killed local Taliban fighters but also led to the deaths of unaffiliated citizens. The chapter compares casualty figures leaked by the US government and the notably higher figures released by reputable private organizations tracking civilian deaths. The author speculates that the continuing discrepancy between administration claims and media reports may be the result of a policy defining ‘military aged males’ as potential militants and thus legitimate military targets. The chapter concludes by calling for greater transparency and external oversight of the US drones program.

Since June 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency is widely reported to have carried out around 300 covert drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan which have killed more than 2000 people including some civilians. Critics have charged that the strikes have resulted in elevated and even disproportionate numbers of civilian deaths. Senior US officials, by contrast, have claimed that civilian casualties have been low. This chapter explores the proportionality of the civilian casualties of drone strikes, drawing on the four most rigorous and transparent databases tracking their impact. It shows that the best available empirical evidence suggests that drones strikes have resulted in a comparatively moderate to low rate of civilian casualties and that their accuracy has significantly improved over the last two years. While this does not entail that all US operations have complied with the requirement of proportionality, it does suggest that violations have not been very widespread or systematic.

Civilian casualty recording and estimation is an extremely contentious endeavor. There is no scientific consensus on the validity and reliability of methods and techniques used to record and estimate casualties. Just as crucially, counting people, whether dead or alive, is an inherently political undertaking. This chapter examines the politics of casualty counting in four recent conflicts: the 1991 Gulf War, the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Iraq War since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, and the conflict in Darfur that has been under way since 2003. In each case, politics plays a major role in answering questions about which methods are used, who gets counted, who does the counting, and how the counts will be used to distribute resources, apportion blame, and produce historical narratives. Ultimately, to properly analyze and interpret casualty statistics, consumers must understand the political dimensions of the records and numbers with which they are presented.

This chapter has two purposes. First, it traces the historical development of norms and rules of war as they relate to civilians, beginning with states’ original interest in helping combatants and ending with the current idea that the protection of civilians from violence is a universal responsibility. This normative shift has had the effect of increasing the influence of civilian casualty numbers on policy choices, making it all the more important to get the numbers right. Second, the chapter identifies strategic peacebuilding as an ambitious attempt to establish both lasting peace and a degree of justice, in part by placing civilian casualties at the center of retributive justice proceedings, such as criminal tribunals, and restorative justice processes, such as truth and reconciliation commissions. In these highly politicized environments, the process of revealing information about civilian losses can be as important as its outcome.

This chapter examines new approaches to reducing and mitigating civilian harm in the United States's counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. It considers U.S. practice and theoretical and practical lessons learned while placing the concerns about mitigating civilian casualties in their larger geopolitical context. The chapter begins with an overview of the U.S. COIN doctrine before turning to a discussion of counterinsurgents' focus on preventing and mitigating harm to civilians vs. asymmetric opponents' efforts to exploit civilian harm. It then describes the U.S. military's newest doctrinal publication aimed specifically at preventing and mitigating harm to civilians.

Accurate records and estimates of civilian casualties are essential to the strategic peacebuilding that should follow conflicts. Creating such casualty records requires strong political resolve and strong science. The chapter summarizes the scientific progress detailed in preceding chapters, as well as some of the political obstacles to implementation. It concludes with a call for an international convention on recording civilian casualties in times of war, to be supported by the scientific and material resources needed to conduct the work with the quality and the dignity that it deserves.

Chapter 9 describes special types of policing, such as military policing and private extralegal protection. Depending on the political regime, military policing is conducted in markedly different ways. Military policing, as exemplified in France, is fully compatible with democracy. It is not different in its nature from civilian policing. The military police operate within a highly centralized structure, they are deployed in rural areas, their chain of command is more rigid, and they are specialized in various duties such as crowd control. In other countries, such as Brazil, military police operate within an undemocratic legal framework that sets them apart from civilian policing. Within this framework they can carry out brutal operations causing a large number of casualties with absolute impunity. The last part of this chapter discusses Gambetta's hypothesis that criminal organizations, such as the Italian or Russian Mafia, provide protection at a high price to private clients.

This chapter examines the Allied forces' efforts to flatten the “bulge” during the final stages of the Battle of the Bulge. The Allied offensive phase started in earnest on January 3, 1945, led by George S. Patton, with simultaneous attacks from the north and the west launched first. By January 25, the Allied forces have successfully eliminated the bulge. This chapter suggests that the German forces' killing of civilians continued until the very end of this battle.

The introductory chapter establishes the importance of knowing how many people die in violent conflicts, and the challenges that must be met to create accurate accounts. To obtain reliable figures on who died, where, and when, researchers must overcome the practical problems of tallying the dead and injured during wars and rebellions, and also circumvent rival parties’ attempts to distort those numbers. Creating authoritative records and counts requires rigorous attention to detail. Without it, recording and counting can promote conflict, rather than peace, as the parties fight over perceived injustices. Accordingly, accurate, accepted records and counts of civilian casualties are fundamental to peacebuilding. The chapter provides a précis of subsequent chapters, which introduce nonspecialists to the science, its controversies, and the debate over what constitutes reliable, valid, and useful data on violence.

Perhaps the most common criticism of teleoperated combat vehicles is that they make war more likely by reducing the associated costs. However, it is not as obvious as is usually presumed that this would be a bad thing: it could as easily be case that drones enable just wars as unjust ones. This chapter advances a version of this argument specific to humanitarian military intervention, holding that, if the claim that drones “lower the threshold” to war is true, drones are likely to significantly improve the practice of intervention to stop genocide and other mass atrocities. In particular, the internal logic of the “lowering the threshold” argument suggests that drones will not only make intervention more likely in cases where it is warranted, but that they will significantly reduce the civilian casualty count during interventions.

Without acknowledging the broad range of suffering caused by terrorism, we cannot fully understand the current and serious threat we are facing in America today. This acknowledgment is also crucial if we are ever to break the cycle of violence fueled by terror and terrorism. The essays in this chapter invite us to enlarge our picture of terrorism by including the purposeful creation of conditions that lead to destitution and starvation, for instance, or by reminding us that whether speaking of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, religion does not cause terrorism. The chapter reprints an address by Jan Egeland, former Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator for the United Nations, on the prevalence of civilian casualties and the need to protect civilians in armed conflict. It also includes an excerpt from the biography of Marla Ruzicka, the young woman who gave her life to assess and redress civilian deaths in Iraq. In addition, the chapter includes essays on nuclear weapons, the history of the car bomb, and radiation and its effects on children.

Capture-recapture techniques, developed to estimate the size of wildlife populations, are now used in the enumeration of elusive human populations to account for the appearance of individuals on overlapping lists. Unlike the applications familiar in wildlife or epidemiology studies, applications used by estimators of civilian casualties usually entail overlapping lists of recorded deaths. The chapter reviews assumptions and data requirements in using capture-recapture to enumerate civilian casualties in conflict zones and discusses the role of the number of lists in relaxing assumptions and the trade-off with the increased complexity of the necessary statistical modeling as the number of lists grows. Additional issues include assessment of uncertainty in estimates, and transparency in interpretation and reporting. Finally, the chapter compares multiple systems estimation with other approaches to casualty assessment in Kosovo and Peru, and discusses challenges to improving and validating capture-recapture methodology.

Although improvements in the evidence base for analyzing armed violence are a positive development, critical exclusions and limitations to what and who is counted and how they are counted pose serious challenges to the development of conflict resolution and violence reduction policies and programs. This chapter reviews the “state of the art” of various approaches to counting casualties and presents the rationale for an integrated approach to counting victims of violence that effaces the boundary between so-called conflict deaths and non-conflict deaths of victims of armed violence. It also considers methodology, examining the technical and conceptual obstacles to achieving a more integrated approach to civilian casualty counting. The chapter concludes by focusing on some of the more philosophical challenges to counting casualties “in the field” and to developing appropriate violence prevention and reduction policies.

This chapter argues that the widely held view that civilians are worse off in today’s wars is flawed. It explores changes in the past two centuries in the roles and perceptions of the civilian. It questions the oft-repeated statistics showing an increase in the ratio of civilian to military casualties. It suggests that in the laws of war (also called international humanitarian law), there have been advances in internationally agreed standards of protection of civilians from the effects of war, and that in practice something has been achieved under the auspices of the United Nations and humanitarian relief bodies. Despite the problems encountered in the protection of civilians, such protection will remain an important aspect of international attempts to limit the effects of war.

This chapter deals with the steady pounding that the by-then virtually undefended German cities were being subjected to by the American and British air forces. It notes that the civilian casualties from these air raids could not help but be substantial. It cites an article titled “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing”, published by John C. Ford, a New England Jesuit. It provides that Father Ford did not, in this article, speak as a pacifist as he was willing to consider the war against Nazi Germany a just war. It notes however, that Ford condemned as unlawful the systematic killing of noncombatants necessarily resulting from the air raids to which German cities were being subjected. It further notes that obliteration (or area) bombing was distinguishable for him from the precision bombing consistent with the long-accepted rules of war.