Nature News is reporting on a new analytical tool that seeks to quantifying the shocking atrocities of war. The Dirty War Index (DWI) has been developed by Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks of King’s College and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College to “[quantify] the number of cases of a particular atrocity — such as rape, civilian deaths or torture — as a proportion of the total number of incidents.” The authors state their motivation for developing the DWI in their article appearing in the most recent issue of PLoS Medicine:
Documentation, analysis, and prevention of the harmful effects of armed conflict on populations are established public health priorities. Although public health research on war is increasingly framed in human rights terms, general public health methods are typically applied without direct links to laws of war. Laws of war are international humanitarian laws and customary standards regarding the treatment of civilians and combatants, mainly described in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols I and II regarding international and civil conflicts. With notable exceptions, absolute numbers are usually reported (e.g., number of persons killed), without systematic description of the proportional effects of armed conflict, thereby limiting the utility of findings and scope of interpretation.
This is a novel idea, but the real work will be in applying the DWI to a large enough data set. The authors provide examples in their article, such as the number of civilian deaths in the Colombian civil conflict from 1988-2005, but this is only a start. An interesting contemporary application of the DWI would be to the SIGACTs data from Iraq and Afghanistan, unfortunately, that would require a level of access that would likely keep the subsequent findings from the eyes of the public. As the authors have shown, however, there is plenty of data available now to begin to derive findings, and I expect to see the DWI filling out the regression tables of many papers in the coming years.
Photo: PLoS Medicine
Automatically Generated Related posts:
[...] Previously on Conflict Health, I discussed a 2008 Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks and Michael Spagat article proposing the brilliantly named “Dirty War Index” as a quantitative means of measuring “particularly undesirable or prohibited, i.e., ‘dirty,’ outcomes inflicted on populations during war (e.g., civilian death, child injury, or torture)”. The Dirty War Index is calculated as follows: (“Dirty” Events / Total Events)*100. It is a quick and umm… dirty measurement of a conflict’s impact on non-combatants. Friend of the site Drew Conway, has discussed DWI at length. [...]