Keith Krause, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, The Graduate Institute, Geneva

In discussions of conflict, war and political violence, dead bodies count and are counted as a form of “conflict expertise. Although the politics and practices associated with the collection of violent death data are seldom subject to critical examination, they are crucial to how scholars and practitioners think about how and why conflict and violence erupt, and to practical strategies for assistance and intervention. Yet knowledge about conflict deaths – the “who, what, where, when, why and how” – is a highly contested form of expertise created, disseminated, and used by different agents. This chapter traces the way in which conflict death data emerged, and highlights the ways in which body counts are deployed as social facts and forms of knowledge that are used to shape and influence policies and practices associated with armed conflict. It then examines critically some of the practices and assumptions of data collection to shed light on the occlusions and implications of various claims to body count expertise, on how these claims are enacted in the public arena, and on how scholarly conflict expertise connects – or not – with programmatic practices.