Beyond Body Counts

JSTOR Daily reports on the gap between what international law requires and what governments actually do when civilians die in war. The piece points to former UK Prime Minister David Cameron's claim of zero known civilian casualties in the fight against ISIS, and to US General Tommy Franks' declaration during the 2003 Iraq war that "we don't do body counts." Into that vacuum stepped nonprofits: Iraq Body Count, which twenty-three years later still tracks a war now estimated at three hundred thousand total deaths, and Every Casualty Counts, whose global tally includes over one million conflict deaths in Ethiopia since 1935 and more than three hundred thousand in Syria. The scholars behind the piece frame the work as more than statistics — it's about giving victims their names back, or as one organization's slogan puts it, proving they were "people, not collateral."

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