The Department of Law and Legal Studies is pleased to share that Associate Professor Christiane Wilke is part of a research team that has won a SSHRC Partnership Engagement Grant (PEG)! The title of the project is “Discordance and Discrepancies: The Politics of Counting Civilian Casualties.” The grant supports a one year collaboration with Airwars, a UK-based non-governmental organization and is worth $24,000. Way to go Christiane & team!
More about the project:
“As part of a major investigation into US military accountability for civilian casualties, in December 2021 the New York Times legally obtained and released more than 1,300 previously classified civilian casualty reports from conflicts in Syria and Iraq (Khan 2021). These reports identify how many civilian casualties have allegedly been killed in each incident, together with assessments by the US military as to whether these allegations are ‘credible’ or ‘non-credible’. Totalling more than 5,400 pages, they also include a wide range of military documents, manuals and guidance on how the US military counts casualties. Importantly for this Partnership Engage Grant, the civilian casualty files reveal extensive and serious discrepancies in the scale of harm and number of casualties reported by the US military and independent monitoring groups. While the US military found only a small fraction of the allegations credible (216 out of 1,311), data collected by project partner Airwars suggests that the total number of civilian casualties in much higher than the military’s count of 1,417.
This project is a partnership with Airwars, a civilian casualty transparency organization with a world-leading track record of informing and changing military practice on civilian casualty accountability. Funding will provide crucial resources to carefully analyze each of these files to understand the extent and nature of the discrepancies between Airwars’ database on civilian harm and the US military database. Scholars and journalists have long argued that military activities carried out in the post 9/11 era are significantly more harmful to civilians than has been officially claimed (Crawford 2017, Rockel & Halpern 2009, Gilbert 2015). The opportunity presented by this innovative partnership allows us to ask why: Why do such discrepancies exist and what are the implications for the assessment of civilian harm in ongoing and future wars? To answer this question, this project will create of new body of evidence that will deepen understandings of civilian harm assessment. It will have two significant outcomes:
First, this evidence base will have notable policy impact: the US and other militaries, including in Canada and the UK, are currently revising their doctrines on civilian harm. These efforts are underpinned by assumptions about how to count civilian casualties that may rest on faulty or unreliable data. By accounting for the discrepancies in methodologies of counting, this research will directly feed into these efforts by identifying precisely where and how such discrepancies arise, and making recommendations for reconciling both the data and the methods used to generate information about civilian harm. Airwars has been invited by the US Department of Defence to provide expertise to improve its civilian harm mitigation in future conflicts, hence the need for a prompt and thorough reconciliation of this crucial new dataset.
Second, it will make innovative research contributions. This partnership will provide unparalleled insights into the ‘politics of counting’, i.e. the ideological and epistemological assumptions that underpin how different actors weigh different variables in producing knowledge about who counts as a civilian and who does not. Each of the academic researchers (as applicant or collaborator) named in this project work on the question of civilian casualties (Gregory 2022, Jones 2020, Jones & Shah 2022, Kinsella 2011, Wilke & Naseemi 2021, Wilke 2021), and to date we have relied on a small number of highly publicized cases. Now, for the first time, we have access to a significant dataset that will allow us to refine our concepts and generate new theories for understanding the politics of counting in war.”