Conflict

           Research Papers

In this article we describe how Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratios (CBDARs) can be used by military and humanitarian organizations to track civilian casualties from military actions, towards the common goal of minimizing civilian harm from war. 

Tracking Civilian Casualties in Combat Zone using Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratios, with Ewan Cameron and Madelyn Hicks, British Army Review, Summer, 2009.

Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency, with Juan Camilo Bohorquez, Sean Gourley, Alex Dixon and Neil F. Johnson, Nature, December 17, 2009.

Good journalistic coverage from Nature, Science, the BBC, Miller-McCune, Big Think, again Big Think with interesting historical backgroud, Discover, a useful interview on the TED website and a nice blog post on Global Guerrillas.

We have also set up a web site on this topic which we call Mathematics of War. This contains a lot of background material on the modeling side of the work. At present it is rather technical but we hope to expand it in the future.

Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation, with Andrew Mack, Tara Cooper and Joakim Kruetz, Journal of Conflict Resolution, December 2009.

Please see the web site that we have set up on this paper at the web site of the Human Security Report Project of Simon Fraser University. This includes a technical appendix.

The Weapons that Kill Civilians with Madelyn Hicks, Hamit Dardagan, Gabriela Guerrero Serdan, Peter Gagnall and John Sloboda, New England Journal of Medicine, April 16, 2009.

We give a short summary in our press release.

There is good journalistic coverage from Miller-McCune, AP, Time and National Public Radio.

Here is a new paper I have just published in PLoS Medicine with Dr. Madelyn Hicks of the Institute of Psychiatry in London (December, 2008):

The Dirty War Index: A Public Health and Human Rights Tool for Examining and Monitoring Armed Conflict Outcomes, PLoS Medicine, 5(12): e243.

There are good journalistic articles about this idea in Nature, Miller-McCune and PHYSORG.com.

The following paper won the Article of the Year in the Journal of Peace Research:

Bias in epidemiological studies of conflict mortality with Neil F. Johnson, Sean Gourley, Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Gesine Reinert, Journal of Peace Research, 45(5), 653-664.

Please visit our web site with much supporting material on this idea which is generally known as "main-street bias" .

There have been good journalistic articles citing this work in Science, Science (again), Nature, Slate, The Times, The New Scientist, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and Miller-McCune Magazine .

Our team now has a follow-up paper:

Sampling Bias due to Structural Heterogeneity and Limited Internal Diffusion with Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Neil F. Johnson, Sean Gourley and Gesine Reinert, European Physics Letters, January 2009.

Here are two presentations that are related to this work.

The first is a presentation I gave at at "Survey Conference 2007: Surveying Health in Complex Situations" sponsored by the CRED - Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Potential Sampling Biases in Mortality Surveys

The second was given at the third annual conference of the Households in Conflict Network on December 11, 2007 at the University of Sussex in which I analyzed some of the responses of the authors of the above Lancet study to the suggestion that their estimates may be affected by main-street bias.

The Discussion of Potential Sampling Bias in the Second Lancet Study of Mortality in Iraq

The following series of papers and presentations are part of a large effort I am making to sort through all sources of information on mortality in the Iraq conflict, separating fact from fiction. I plan to write a book on this subject.

The document below was my first serious effort in this area. It is a presentation I gave at George Mason University School of public policy on November 29, 2007:

How Many Dead (Really): Fact and Fiction Regarging Civilian Casualties in Iraq

In the paper below I make the case that the data from the Second Lancet survey of mortality in Iraq are unsound and unethically gathered.

Ethical and Data-Integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality in Iraq (September, 2008 version)

This is now forthcoming in Defence and Peace Economics. The journal invited a response from the authors of the second Lancet survey but they failed to provide one. As of December, 2008 there have been no substantive responses on any of the issues I raise in my paper.

Here is the abstract:

This paper considers the second Lancet survey of mortality in Iraq published in 2006.  It presents evidence suggesting ethical violations to the survey’s respondents including endangerment, privacy breaches and in obtaining informed consent.  Breaches of minimal disclosure standards examined include non-disclosure of the survey’s questionnaire, data-entry form, data matching anonymized interviewer IDs with households and sample design.  The paper also presents evidence relating to data fabrication and falsification which falls into nine broad categories.  This evidence suggests that this survey cannot be considered a reliable or valid contribution towards knowledge about the extent of mortality in Iraq since 2003.

Here is a (relatively) brief summary of the above paper with a little bit of further material.

Summary Document

Here is a presentation of the paper that I gave at the JSM Meetings in Denver in August of 2008 (with some slight improvements over the original). It is mostly a briefer summary than the above document but it also contains some new material summarizing key sources of information on mortality in Iraq. These demonstate that the second Lancet survey of mortality in Iraq is far outside the mainstream of mortality information for Iraq.

Counting the Dead in Iraq

Here is a follow up paper to the Ethics and Data Integrity paper.

Mainstreaming an Outlier: The Quest to Corroborate the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality in Iraq , slightly revised, February 2009.

Here is the abstract:

I survey much evidence on mortality in Iraq, including data from the first and second Lancet surveys, the Iraq Living Conditions Survey, the Iraq Family Health Survey, the Iraq Body Count project, the Pentagon, the Baghdad morgue and two polls.  The second Lancet survey is inconsistent with all relevant information on violence trends and on the geographical distribution of violence.  The overall violence levels found in the second Lancet survey are supported only by one poll which, however, differs strongly with the second Lancet survey on the geographical distribution of violence.  I discuss weaknesses in attempts made by The Bloomberg School of Public Health and authors of the second Lancet survey to claim corroboration for the second Lancet survey from the above and other sources.  These attempts not withstanding, the second Lancet survey is a clear outlier within a wide body of evidence on mortality in Iraq.

Here is a letter that was recently published in Science and here is the Science article it was responding to.

An important package of articles on the Lancet dispute came out in January of 2008 on in the National Journal. Here are my initial impressions on this work.

First Thoughts on the National Journal Articles on the Lancet Surveys of Mortality in Iraq

Here is a presentation I gave originally at a conference at CRED in Belgium in November of 2008. It is the beginning of an effort to work through reliability of estimates of violent and non-violent deaths in conflict surveys based on cluster surveys with a small number of clusters. The early findings already make it pretty clear that estimates of violent deaths based on, say, 30 to 50 clusters are quite unreliable whereas estimates of non-violent deaths are based on similar sample sizes are fairly reasonable. I post a revised version that I gave at a later conference in Pittsburgh in October of 2009.

Non-violent and Violent Conflict Deaths in Small Cluster Surveys

Next is a line of work on the size distributions of violent events in conflict.

"Universal patterns underlying ongoing wars and terrorism" with Neil Johnson, Jorge Restrepo, Óscar Becerra, Juan Camilo Bohórquez, Nicolás Suarez, Elvira María Restrepo, and Roberto Zarama, 2006.

This was a new version of "From Old Wars to New Wars ..." (next item) and drew a nice review in Physorg.com. Neil Johnson summarized this research program in The Back Page of APS News, November 2006, Volume 15, Number 10. There was also a write-up in Science.

"From Old Wars to New Wars and Global Terrorism," with Neil Johnson, Jorge Restrepo, Juan Camilo Bohórquez, Nicolás Suarez, Elvira María Restrepo, and Roberto Zarama, 2005.

This paper has received press coverage in the Economist, The Guardian and Nature. There is some interesting commentary on Global Guerrillas.

Here is a letter that I published in the BMJ commenting on on the article: "Fifty years of violent deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme" by Obermeyer, Murray and Gakidou. Soon I will have a paper on this subject.

Letter

"Ultrametric Wavelet Regression of Multivariate Time Series: Application to Colombian Conflict Analysis," with Fionn Murtagh and Jorge Restrepo.

"The Work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Evidence from Colombia," with Andres Ballesteros, Jorge Restrepo and Juan F. Vargas, CERAC Working Paper number 4, 2007.

"La desmovilización y el desarme paramilitar en Colombia: éxito provisional y silencioso," This article was published in Hechos Del callejón, UNDP Colombia, 17, August 2006 but due to an apparent miscommunication it was missing many corrections to an earlier draft of the translation that Jorge Restrepo and Juan Telliz had kindly made for me. I asked my contacts at Hechos to replace the web version of my piece with the corrected version and they agreed to do this but never actually did. Instead they seem to have deleted my piece from the web site and replaced it with another one. The above link is what should have appeared. I cannot find the Spanish versions of the maps and figures any more but there are English version at the end of the link below.

"Colombia's paramilitary DDR: Quiet and Tentative Success," this is the English version of the above Spanish piece, complete with figures and maps. It came out in English on the CERAC web site in August of 2006.

This work was cited in the Economist and World Politics Watch.

"Natural Disasters, Casualties and Power Laws", with Óscar Becerra, Neil Johnson, Patrick Meier and Jorge Restrepo, 2006.

"Colombia's hydra: The many faces of gun violence," with Katerine Aguirre, Robert Muggah and Jorge Restrepo, 2006.

There was a summary article of "Colombia's Hydra" in the Financial Times by Andy Webb-Vidal.  Links to extensive coverage in Spanish in April of 2006 can be found on the CERAC web page, CEARC on the Media.

"Human Rights Conditions on Foreign Aid Can Backfire," with Michael Mandler, 2005.

"Foreign Aid Designed to Diminish Terrorist Atrocities can Increase Them," with Michael Mandler.  (This paper is being split into two papers and hence covers some of the same ground as the paper above.), 2003.
The Colombian Conflict: Where is it Heading?, with Jorge Restrepo, 2005.

“Briefing on the Colombian Conflict,” (for the incoming British Ambassador to Colombia ), 2005.

"Civilian Casualties in the Colombian Conflict: A New Approach to Human Security," with Jorge Restrepo, 2004.

"The Severity of the Colombian Conflict: Cross-Country Datasets vs. New Micro Data," with Jorge Restrepo and Juan Fernando Vargas, Journal of Peace Research, 43 (1), January 2006, pp. 99-115.

"The Colombian Conflict: Uribe's First 17 Months," with Jorge Restrepo, in Survival, vol. 47, issue 5, 2004, pp. 131-152 as "Colombia's Tipping Points?".

“El conflicto en Colombia: ¿quién hizo qué a quién? Un enfoque cuantitativo,” with Jorge Restrepo and Juan Fernando Vargas, 2005, Francisco Gutiérrez (ed.), Nuestra guerra sin nombre, Norma, 2006.

“La Dinámica del Conflicto Colombiano, 1988-2003,” with Jorge Restrepo and Juan Fernando Vargas, 2004.

"The Dynamics of the Colombian Civil Conflict: A New Dataset," with Jorge Restrepo and Juan F. Vargas, Homo Oeconomicus, 21(2), 2004, pp. 396-428..

"The Evolution of Modern Education Systems: Technical vs. General Education, Distributional Conflict and Growth,"  with Graziella Bertocchi., Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 73, no. 2, March 2004, pp. 559-582.

           Short pieces on the Colombian Conflict

Book Review of  "Americas's Other War" by Doug Stokes, Journal of Peace Research, 2007.

"Colombia's Chimaera: Reflections on Human Security and Armed Violence," with Robert Muggah, Jorge Restrepo and Keith Krause, Human Security Bulletin, December, 2005.

"Kate Moss Should Support reparations for Colombia's Victims," Human Security Bulletin, December, 2005.

"Rethinking the Colombian Conflict," with Jorge Restrepo, November 15, 2004.

"Ser leal con Colombia," El Tiempo, June 29, 2004.

"U.S. Must Stand by Colombia," Miami Herald, June 23, 2004.

Dictatorship

"The Dynamics of Repressive Dictatorships," with Jorge Restrepo, 2001.

"Political Instability and Growth in Dictatorships," with Jody Overland and Kenneth Simons, Public Choice, 2005.

" The Politics of Co-optation, "  with Graziella Bertocchi, Journal of Comparative Economics,  Vol. 29, no. 4, December 2001.

The Transition from Communism

           Human Capital

"Education and the Transition from Communism," with Ksenia Iliasova, 2004, revised 2006.

"Human Capital and the Future of Transition Economies." Journal of Comparative Economics, 34 (1), March 2006, pp. 44-56.

"Human Capital, Growth and Inequality in Russia," with C. Simon Fan and Jody Overland, Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 27, no. 4, December 1999,  pp. 618-643.

"Human Capital, Growth and Inequality in Transition Economies." in Nauro Campos and Jan Fidrmuc (eds.), "Political Economy of Transition and Development: Institutions, Politics and Policies." ZEI Studies in European Economics and Law, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht/London, 2003.

           General

A Book Review of Incentives and Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia.  By Serguey Braguinsky and Grigory Yavlinsky, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XL, no. 1, March 2002.

"Structural Uncertainty and Subsidy Removal for Economies in Transition," with Graziella Bertocchi, European Economic Review, vol. 41,  no. 9, Dec. 1997, pp. 1709-33.

Monetary Policy

"Structural Uncertainty and Central Bank Conservatism; The Ignorant Should Shut Their Eyes," with Mauricio Rosal, 2002, revised 2006.

"Learning, experimentation, and monetary policy," with Graziella Bertocchi, Journal Of Monetary Economics, (32)1 (1993) pp. 169-183

Bayesian Learning

"Growth Under Uncertainty with Experimentation," with Graziella Bertocchi, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 23, no. 2, November 1998, pp.  209-31.

"Leaving Some Stones Unturned; A Reassessment of Iterative Planning Theory," Journal of Public Economics, vol. 58, 1995.

Here is a letter written by Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts written to the National Journal. It cannot be found anywhere else on the in internet besides here. I need to refer to it in a paper I have written and I want readers to have easy access to it so I have posted it.

Here is a Q&A document on two Iraq mortality studies that was posted on the web site of the Bloomberg web site and withdrawn without explanation. I also refer to this in the same paper mentioned above and want readers to have access to it.

Here is another document that had dissappeared from the web. This is the basis of a somewhat widespread believe that a survey was done finding 37,000 civilians killed in the very early stages of the Iraq war.