Accounting for Death in War: Separating Fact from Fiction (FutureLearn)

Along the way you will debunk some widely circulated war-death claims. You will focus mainly on direct, violent deaths but will also cover some estimates of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by war.
What topics will you cover?

- Memorializing people who people who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians

- The idea of casualty recording; listing war dead name-by-name or event-by-event with details about each case

- Using statistical methods to estimate the total number of war deaths and breakdowns by categories

- Estimating the number of non-violent deaths caused indirectly by war

- Applications to air strikes and explosive violence worldwide and to wars in Kosovo, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

- Explain the main methods used to account for war deaths

- Describe the state of war-death knowledge for several modern wars, including some that have been misrepresented by faulty statistics

- Evaluate the quality of war-death numbers and debate their strengths and weaknesses

- Calculate war-death estimates from some basic pieces of information