Battle Deaths Data

Description of dataset:

This project maintains a dataset on battle deaths (soldiers and civilians killed in combat) in state-based armed conflicts. The original release in 2005 covered the period 1946–2002.

See: Bethany Lacina & Nils Petter Gleditsch, 2005. ‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths’, European Journal of Population 21(2–3): 145–166.

A longer time series (1900-2002) is used in:

Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch & Bruce Russett, 2006. 'The Declining Risk of Death in Battle', International Studies Quarterly 50(3): 673-680. Click here to access replication data for this article.

Debate about the battle deaths and war deaths

An article in a medical journal (Obermeier et al., 2008) took our data as a starting-point for a claim that ’Globally, war has killed three times more people than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support claims of a recent decline in war deaths’ (BMJ press release). In a recent article, Spagat et al. (2009) found that ‘The article by Obermeyer and colleagues presented a critique of the PRIO dataset in a high-visibility journal that unwarrantably faulted the scholarship of the PRIO researchers who produced it. Yet the article signally failed to substantiate any of its major criticisms, while containing serious methodological and factual errors’ (press release from the Human Security Report). The authors also claimed that BMJ had shown itself to ‘effectively unaccountable to its critics’.