Title:	Violence, Statistics, and the Politics of Accounting for the Dead
Authors:	Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos Elizabeth Minor Samrat Sinha
Keywords:	Violence
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	It should go without saying that numbers cannot properly represent human lives. Numbers more or less perfectly occupy the domain of the measurable and quantifi - able, of interchangeable units – money and credit, bales of cotton and bushels of wheat. Even some of these we only consider unitary for convenience: in reality each individual grain of wheat in every silo in the world is unique; it is just that replacing one grain with another of the same variety makes no meaningful difference. Human lives are not so interchangeable, and it is here that – for our species, anyway –the words “irreplaceable” and “unique” fi nd their most profound meaning. So when we document human lives lost to armed violence and confl ict, it can never be enough to record how many have died, but who has died: only a record of individuals killed can hope to represent their loss adequately. If the circumstances and means available to casualty recording practitioners allow it, this normally means a list of names. Under the best circumstances, it can mean extended biographies and recollections of the dead by those who knew and loved them. Such meticulous casualty recording in no way precludes an analytical and statistical approach to the information it uncovers: rather, it enhances the ability to acquire meaningful understanding from the details that are known about individuals, including their demographics, and the circumstances under which they were killed. All too often, especially in poorer countries, the casualties of armed violence, most of them civilian, are only recorded as statistics, as numbers alone. A weakness of this state of affairs is that mere numbers are much easier to dispute and argue over and, as is evidently appealing to some, can draw attention away from the victims to quarrels over whose methods are the best. The experiences of today’s casualty recorders, most of them working in the civil society, and the obstacles they face as presented in this (it is fair to say) uniquely practitioner-informed book provide ample evidence that while progress is being made, perhaps the bulk of it is ahead of us. We should also take note that no matter how fully a human life is memorialised, it cannot truly represent that life, any more than their name, alone, really indicates who the living, breathing human being was. But what the recording of the dead – including their unequal recording across the world, particularly in offi cial efforts – does very accurately depict is how much value we place on their loss. In that respect, the work of casualty recorders probably says as much about our society as it does about the dead.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55136
ISBN:	978-3-319-12036-2
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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