The purpose of the Every Casualty (EC) programme is to enhance the technical, legal and institutional capacity, as well as the political will, to record details of every single casualty of armed conflict throughout the world, civilian as well as combatant. Civilian deaths are particularly poorly documented, and often not recorded at all. Where death tolls are limited to purely numerical assessments, exaggerated, politicised claims and counter-claims frequently abound. By contrast, where Western nations are engaged in conflicts, they meticulously record their military dead not as numbers but by name.
Such detailed, verifiable and comprehensive recording when extended to all victims provides both a memorial for posterity and public recognition of our common humanity. Careful and respectful records ensure that the human cost of conflict is better understood and can become an immediately applicable resource for conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery and reconciliation.
The programme (formerly known as the Recording Casualties of Armed Conflict programme) is divided into two parallel but interrelated streams, which complement and support each other.
Practice Stream: The support and development of effective practice in casualty recording
This stream focuses on those organisations and individuals that have already made direct contributions to the work of casualty recording. Our aim is to bring these organisations and individuals - previously operating in isolation - into productive dialogue and peer exchange.
The stream currently has two projects:
- The International Practitioner Network, a pioneer of its kind in the world whose members are all organisations that document violent deaths from conflict. The Network aims to provide a platform for the sharing of common problems, solutions and aspirations between members. The goal is to provide lasting benefit to members in their own individual work, advance members’ shared goal of strengthening practice and facilitate a more effective and united voice among practitioners.
- Documenting Existing Casualty Recording Practice Worldwide, a two-year research project to comprehensively document and analyse current practice in casualty recording. The aim of the research is to help develop and strengthen casualty recording practice, towards establishing it as a robust and recognised field. The research will be of use to current projects, the grounding of future projects and the needs of the field as a whole. It will also allow the production of well-informed policy papers on casualty recording.
Advocacy Stream: The development of international norms and standards
In this stream we work to develop the concepts and tools which will be necessary for governments and intergovernmental organisations to come together in a concerted effort to support the spread of effective and credible casualty recording. Our strategy includes detailed research into existing international regulatory instruments, including their unrealized potentials and possible shortcomings, and carefully-framed proposals on how to more effectively embed casualty recording within international systems. It also includes engaging individuals and organisations as well as state actors well-placed to act as champions for casualty recording on the international stage.
Our current project in this stream is:
- Making Casualty Recording a Legal Requirement, entailing a comprehensive investigation into the law as it applies to all aspects of casualty recording, aiming to demonstrate that the recording of casualties is consistent with commitments already made by the international community and identifying how these can be further developed.
Staff
Hamit Dardagan
Hamit Dardagan is Co-Director of ORG's Every Casualty programme. Hamit became ORG’s Consultant on Civilian Casualties in War in 2007. With John Sloboda he now co-directs ORG's Every Casualty programme. 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 Co-Director of Oxford Research Group's Every Casualty programme. 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 Department of Economcs 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.
Jacob Beswick
Jacob Beswick is project manager on the Every Casualty programme’s International Practitioner Network project. He recently completed an MSc at the London School of Economics where he studied Comparative Politics with a focus in Nationalism and Ethnicity.
Before moving to London he worked in Texas politics where he helped run several state-wide and local campaigns. Following the 2008 US election cycle he worked as a policy analyst for a Texas state representative.
Professor Susan Breau
Susan Breau is Legal consultant to ORG's Every Casualty Programme. She is 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.
Rachel Joyce
Rachel Joyce is the legal consultant and researcher on the Every Casualty programme.
Rachel graduated with distinction from King's College, London, with an MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice. She received the ICPR Prize for Best Dissertation 2008/2009. She is concurrently undertaking PhD studies in King's College on the subject of dehumanisation in ethnic conflict. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Civil Law from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Elizabeth Minor
Elizabeth Minor is the Every Casualty 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 homeless hostels and previously worked voluntarily with asylum seekers.
Professor Michael Spagat
Michael Spagat is ORG's consultant on casualty recording and estimation. He is a Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He gained his Ph.D. at Harvard University and has held faculty posts at Brown University and the University of Illinois.
His papers on armed conflict have been published in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and PLoS Medicine. His current research addresses universal patterns in modern war, the Dirty War Index, civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict, and problems in the measurement of war deaths.
Advisors
Dr Neta Crawford
Neta C. Crawford is Professor of Political Science and African American Studies where her teaching focuses on international ethics and normative change. She is currently on the board of the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS).
She has also served as a member of the governing Council of the American Political Science Association; on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review; and on the Slavery and Justice Committee at Brown University, which examined Brown University's relationship to slavery and the slave trade
Eric Herring
Dr. Eric Herring is Reader in International Politics at the University of Bristol. His research falls within critical security studies, which seeks to relate security scholarship to progressive social change. His main focus is on international policy regarding Iraq.
His books include (co-authored with Glen Rangwala) 'Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy' (C. Hurst & Co./Cornell University Press 2006). He served as specialist adviser to the Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords for its inquiry into economic sanctions (2006-2007).
Hanny Megally
Hanny Megally is the Middle East and North Africa Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice. He has more than 26 years of experience in the field of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa.
From 1984 to 1994, he headed the Middle East Research department at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, based in London. Subsequently, he ran the Ford Foundation's social justice program in the Middle East from the Foundation's Cairo office, and from 1997 to 2003 he was the executive director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. He has traveled widely in the region, including leading human rights research missions and conducting high-level meetings with heads of state and government officials.
Richard Moyes
Richard Moyes is Policy and Research Director at Action on Armed Violence (formerly Landmine Action) and one of the co-chairs of the Cluster Munition Coalition. He was one of the main civil society strategists in the development of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.
He has previously been a humanitarian mine clearance programme manager and has undertaken extensive research on risk-taking behaviour amongst communities living with landmines and unexploded ordnance. Current research and policy work addresses armed violence more broadly, with a specific focus on the problems of explosive weapons.
Tom Porteous
Tom Porteous directs Human Rights Watch's London Office. Since joining Human Rights Watch in October 2006 he has become a leading voice for the protection and promotion of human rights in policy discussions in the UK and in the UK media.
He has focused in particular on the protection of Iraqi refugees and on UK counterterrorism policies at home and abroad. Tom 25 years of experience working in journalism, conflict management and diplomacy in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was a freelance correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, the BBC and other media, first in Cairo and later in Berlin and Morocco.
Everett Ressler
Everett Ressler works in the humanitarian field as a practioner, lecturer and researcher. He has participated in more than 150 emergencies internationally and has monitored and supported efforts in many more.
Between 1994-2008 he worked as a UNICEF senior advisor, regional emergency advisor and chief of UNICEF’s global early warning in support of preparedness and response efforts in more than 120 countries. He has co-authored several global reference publications and papers in the humanitarian field and lead research and evaluations on topics including the care and protection of children in war, internal displacement, contingency planning, and early warning. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva and a senior humanitarian focal point within the KonTerra Group.
Dr Jay Silverstein
Dr Jay Silverstein is a forensic anthropologist for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. The mission of JPAC is to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation’s past conflicts. He is also a Professor of Anthropology at the Univeristy of Hawaii.
Mirsad Tokaca
Mirsad Tokaca is the president of the Research and Documentation Center (RDC), a nongovernmental organization based in Sarajevo, devoted to documenting human losses in Bosnia-Herzegovina due to conflict.
RDC's "Bosnian Book of the Dead" contains a meticulously researched database of the victims of the 1992-95 war. He was secretary of the Bosnia-Herzegovina State Commission On War Crimes Documentation, and has led similar commission, this time at the level of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also runs a software company in Sarajevo.
