Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict

Programme team: 

Elizabeth Minor

Elizabeth Minor is the Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict programme’s Researcher. She first joined Oxford Research Group as an intern in 2009 during which time she oversaw the inauguration of the practitioner network. She has since worked as a Researcher for Iraq Body Count. She holds an MSc in Comparative Politics, Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science; her dissertation examined the transitional justice goals attached to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. She also holds a first class degree in History from University College London. Elizabeth also works at a homeless women’s hostel and voluntarily with asylum seekers.

Hamit Dardagan

Hamit Dardagan became ORG’s Consultant on Civilian Casualties in War in March 2007. He is co-founder and principal researcher at Iraq Body Count (IBC), where he has taken the lead on the development of IBC's analytic tools and ouputs.. He has written for Counterpunch, and has undertaken research for a number of organisations, including Greenpeace. He has been chair of Kalayaan a human rights campaign for overseas domestic workers in the UK, which led to significant enhancement in their legal rights.

John Sloboda

John Sloboda is Consultant and Director of Oxford Research Group's Recording Casualties in Armed Conflict programme and chairs its International Advisory Group.  From 2004 to 2009 he was Executive Director of ORG. Some concluding remarks on his six years in this role may be downloaded here.  He is also Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Keele, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since 2003, he has been co-director of the Iraq Body Count project, which remains the only continuously updated source of event-based information about civilian casualties in the ongoing Iraq conflict. He undertakes regular speaking engagements, and is an occasional author for openDemocracy. In July 2004, John was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy.

Rachel Joyce

Rachel Joyce joined the Oxford Research Group as an intern in April, working largely within the legal project of the Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict programme. Rachel graduated with distinction from King's College, London, in January 2010 with an MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She received the ICPR Prize for Best Dissertation 2008/2009 for her paper "The Causational Factors of Detainee Abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison." Her main interests are state crime, mass atrocity, human rights and dehumanisation. Concurrently to her work at ORG, she is involved as a researcher, online communications officer and advocacy project coordinator with the Tamil Information Centre and its sister branch, the Tamil Women's Development Forum. Rachel will begin an MPhil in King's College in September 2010. She also holds a Bachelor's degree in Civil Law from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Dr Susan Breau

Susan Breau is Legal consultant to ORG's Recording Casualties in Armed Conflict Programme.  Currently Reader in the School of Law at the University of Surrey, she will take up a new position as Professor of International Law at Flinders University, Australia from July 2010. Her research interests are concentrated in public international law and the international protection of human rights, particularly those issues relating to the use of force. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 2003 at LSE for her research into Humanitarian Intervention under the supervision of Professor Christopher Greenwood. She was the Dorset Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law for three years. Prior to that appointment she was a lecturer in international law and human rights at Queen's University Belfast where she assisted in the administration of their LLM in Human Rights Programmes and she has also lectured on the law of armed conflict in the LLM programme at the London School of Economics.

Advisory board:

  • Dr Susan Breau – Reader in International Law, University of Surrey
  • Dr Neta Crawford – Professor of Political Science, Boston University
  • Hamit Dardagan – Consultant on Civilian Casualties in Conflict, ORG (O)
  • Dr Eric Herring – Reader in International Politics, Bristol University
  • Hanny Megally – Middle East Director, International Commission on Transitional Justice (O)
  • Richard Moyes – Director of Policy & Research, Action on Armed Violence (O)
  • Tom Porteous – UK Director, Human Rights Watch (O)
  • Everett Ressler - Visiting Professor, University of Geneva
  • Dr Jay Silverstein – Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawaii
  • Professor Michael Spagat – Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London
  • Mirsad Tokaca – Director, Research and Documentation Centre of Sarajevo (O)

(O = organisational member, others are serving in personal capacity)

The long-term aim of this human security project is to build the technical and institutional capacity, as well as the political will, to record details of every single victim of violent conflict, worldwide. This represents the next step beyond existing estimation and other aggregate ‘measurement’ of human losses (such as numerical totals) to the identification and documentation of each and every individual who is killed or injured in armed conflicts. Among other benefits, such recording acts as a memorial for posterity and a recognition of our common humanity across the world. Most importantly, it will ensure that the full cost of conflict is known and can be understood to the greatest extent achievable, and become an immediately applicable component, and resource for, conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery and reconciliation.

Achieving the aims of this project will require the active participation of states and inter-state bodies (up to and including the United Nations), and such activity may eventually become codified in formal and binding agreements on parties to conflicts. State support will be hastened by strong civil society advocacy, highlighting the moral and practical advantages.

Some conflict documentation is already being carried out, by varied actors with varying methods and varying levels of resource. Projects can be officially sponsored/sanctioned or they can be unofficial citizen-led activities. A wide range of users and potential users of such detailed information has already been identified. 

Progress to date

In 2007 a consultation document (PDF) which was sent for comment to over 200 experts worldwide. Consultees were selected to cover a wide range of relevant professional expertise: legal, military, humanitarian and methodological. A series of small consultative roundtables were held to refine and develop the concept further and the outcome of these consultations was the setting up of an international advisory group in January 2008 to guide the project through its next stages.

Global practitioner network

In 2009, ORG launched the first major activity of the programme, a international practitioner network for casualty recorders. There are many locally-based organisations operating in zones of current or recent conflict working to collect, record, and ultimately memorialise the casualties of conflict. However, the predominant feature of their work is that each organisation operates in relative isolation, devising solutions in an ad-hoc manner, being largely unaware of the work that is going on elsewhere. There has been a clearly expressed need for a platform to allow such organisations to network productively with each other, and address common problems and aspirations.

Joint Communiqué

On the 25th of November 2009, the twenty founding members of the international practitioner network released the following first joint communiqué:

The organisations listed below announce the formation of the first international network of organisations who publicly record the victims of armed conflict as individuals, which has now begun its activities.

We believe that documenting the details of every human killed in war is a moral act based on recognising the value of every human life. We also believe that it is necessary for justice, holding the prosecutors of war to account, as a means to overcome uncertainties about deaths which are only recorded as numbers, and as a way of constructing a lasting historical memory of the dead.

Failure to comprehensively record every individual casualty of war can only bring greater pain and suffering. This suffering ranges from the denial of the experience of victims’ families, all the way through to community grievances which stimulate the renewal or escalation of violent conflict through politically motivated claims. The only long term answer to these problems is the establishment of detailed and certain truth.

We will collaborate to raise our capacity, visibility and collective strength, thereby enhancing casualty recording activities worldwide. Together we will be better able to overcome the problems we face every day in our work. Our final goal is that the world recognise the need to record every casualty of every conflict wherever it happens.

We call on governments and intergovernmental agencies to support the activity of casualty recording worldwide.

The communique is available in español.

 

Current members of the practitioner network:

 

Legal Project on a Regulatory Framework

The RCAC team began work in February 2010 on ‘Developing a Regulatory Framework’ - a two-year project to undertake research and develop a proposal for a new international legal instrument, which would require, and regulate, the recording of conflict casualties. The project is being led by Dr Susan Breau, international lawyer at the University of Surrey, and is supported by an advisory group of further leading international lawyers. The project is made possible by a £24,000 grant from The Funding Network.

 

Objectives for 2009-11

With key partners we will convene and co-ordinate an interlocking set of sub-projects under two main streams:

Stream A – Support and development of effective practice in casualty recording: This stream will focus on those organisations and individuals that have already made direct contributions to the work of casualty recording. It also creates and facilitates a more effective and united voice among practitioners.

Stream B – Development of international norms and standards: This stream will focus on developing the concepts and tools which will be necessary for governments and intergovernmental organisations to come together in a concerted way to support the spread of effective and credible casualty recording.

Funders

This project has received grant support from The Funding Network and The Network for Social Change.  

Publications: 
A Dossier of Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 2003-2005
Bold new claims, no new evidence: NATO's 'avoidance' of civilian harm needs measuring, not re-stating
Can there be any 'just war' if we do not document the dead and injured?
In Everyone’s Interest: Recording All The Dead, Not Just Our Own
The 'War on Terrorism': 12-Month Audit and Future Strategy Options
The Need to Acquire Accurate Casualty Records in NATO Operations

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