#Total war definition series#

It is for this reason that they do not show the jump in 1994 that marks the Rwandan genocide.

#Total war definition series#

The UCDP state-based and Correlates of War series do not include such events. ‘One-sided violence’ on the other hand is where one organized actor (either a state or non-state group) attacks people that do not have any organized military capability to defend themselves, as in the case of genocide or ‘ politicide‘. Non-state conflicts are those between two or more non-state actors, with no state involvement. Non-state actors are those that demonstrate a degree of coordinated military organisation but whose identity falls short of statehood. State-based conflict is that involving at least one state-actor, and includes conflicts between states (“inter-state” conflicts) and those between a state and non-state actor (“extra-state” conflicts), such as civil wars or colonial wars. The kind of event depends on the type of actors involved. What: state involvement and one-sided violenceĪcross the various sources there three broad kinds of violent event distinguished: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. Nevertheless, as we would expect, the death rates reported in the Conflict Catalog do come out the highest. For instance, whilst famines are often triggered by conflicts, many factors contribute to their onset and severity, such as the level of sanitation or the transportation infrastructure present.īrecke does not attempt to provide a clear-cut definition, and this conceptual boundary has been largely dictated by the available primary sources he used in each estimate. While indirect deaths represent a substantial proportion of the social costs of conflict, there is a conceptual difficulty in drawing a consistent boundary between indirect deaths attributable to the conflict and those due to other factors. Peter Brecke, the author of the dataset, however acknowledges that the degree to which this is in fact achieved varies considerably across conflicts. The Conflict Catalog series (running to 2000 only) tries to include indirect deaths of both the military and civilian populations.

The Correlates of War series includes military personnel that died from diseases ‘contracted in the war theatre’. The UCDP and IHME data include only direct deaths. But historically, such indirect deaths were also a major cause of military fatalities. This is particularly true where conflicts lead to famine or outbreaks of disease among the civilian population. In addition to those deaths caused directly by violence – for instance those from gunshot or explosions – a significant proportion of lives lost in conflict are indirect: due to disease, starvation or exposure. As we would expect then, the Correlates of War figures are generally lower than the others. The Correlates of War series aims to include only deaths of military personnel, whereas the other sources capture – at least to some extent – civilian deaths too. If you hover over the datapoints, you can see the exact figures: the highest figure for a given year is typically well more than double the lowest. If you look closely, you’ll see that there are large relative differences between the series over the entire period as well, though they are understated by the 1994 peak. Most noticeably, there is a large jump in 1994 – marking the Rwandan genocide – which is present in some series, but absent from others. Overall they show a decline in conflict deaths into the 2000s, followed by an increase in the 2010s. You see in the chart that there are certainly similarities across the different sources. We’ve summarised more information about the data sources and how we handled them to produce the chart above in a document, World conflict deaths since 1989: Notes on five sources. (We show the data for these categories separately here). The ‘UCDP all’ series is an aggregation of the deaths recorded in each of the three categories of conflict used by Uppsala Conflict Data Program: state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence. Here we show the world conflict death rate since 1989 according to five sources. To answer the question of how many people die in conflicts today, and how this has changed over time, we can turn to a number of different datasets.