Examining the sixth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
In this lecture, Dr. Spagat works from three existing database from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (run by a group in Sweden). We were aware of these when we were doing our work on insurgencies, but never tapped them. We probably would have at some point, if the work had continued.
Anyhow, Dr. Spagat continues with his analysis of civilian casualties in conflict. We certainly could have done something useful with his Civilian Targeting Index (CTI — defined on slide 3) and looking at whether it effected the outcome of an insurgency. Slide 4 is worth noting, as is slide 8.
The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%206.pdf
On slide 6 is his four “key take-home” points. They are:
- “First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting…”
- “Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some degree of civilian targeting (CTI > 0), as opposed to none (CTI = 0), if they participated in armed conflict for three or more years rather than for one year….”
- “Third, among actors that targeted civilians (there were 88 of them), those that engaged in great scales of armed conflict concentrated less of their lethal behavior into civilian targeting and more into involvement with battle fatalities…”
- “Fourth, an actor’s likelihood and degree of targeting civilians was unaffected by whether it was a state or a non-state group.”
Now, granted this is a snap-shot of only five years, but it is one with more than 88 cases in it, but it is still interesting to note. None of the work we did support nor contradicts any of these results.
Slides 9 to 13 is a discussion of logistic regression and linear regression, which is something that I think everyone should understand, but won’t be surprised if our readers choose to skip it. There are some interesting (as always) Slides are pages 14, 16, 17 and 21. In fact, slide 21 is a pretty good to use in an argument with someone who thinks things are only getting worse. It is worth your while to look at it.
Starting on slide 22 to the end (slide 34), Dr. Spagat takes on counter-arguments developed as a result of examining World Health Surveys (WHS), which is a point worth noting. Lots of people like to throw around figures. These figures are not always very accurate.
Anyhow, these lectures are great to flip through, and if you actually carefully (and painfully) read through them, it is probably a better use of your time than most things you will do this week.
