Chapter 5 Research Lecture Series: Counting The Dead

5.1 The Big Picture: Accountability for Killing

Please take time to consider what you would like to do for your final assessment prior to attending this class.

This lecture will introduce five of the general components for a successful research essay: Identifying a research area, identifying an interesting research problem, constructing a theoretical framework, posing an answerable research question, and considering the implications of your research. We will be covering one of these in detail each week. In this lecture, we will discuss different processes of identifying research areas.

This lecture also provides an outline of my own research project, namely, contemporary arguments about the duties of militaries to analyse the civilian deaths and collateral damage caused by their actions. I will walk you through the project and my paper, but the emphasis of the lecture will be about the process of identifying a research area. For that reason, we’ll be discussing the wider issue of accountability for killing in armed conflict. This is an important area of contemporary research, work here often transcends disciplinary boundaries, and also segues into political campaigns aimed at righting what some perceive as injustices in the way contemporary warfare is waged. We will discuss ways of working from a topic of personal interest or contemporary policy problem to a research area that connects with existing academic research.

• Discussion Questions:
  • What makes an academic research project worth doing?
  • What role does silence play in contemporary debates about civilian casualties?
• Readings:
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). Introduction and chapter 1
  • Aronson, Jay D. “The Politics of Civilian Casualty Counts.” In Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, edited by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff. Oxford University Press, (2013).
  • McDonald, Jack. “Rational Nescience or Strategic Ignorance? Epistemic Approaches to Civilian Casualty Reporting in Contemporary Conflicts.” Working Paper, (2019a).

5.2 Research Problem: Arguing About Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria

How do you go from an interesting area of research to an interesting research problem? In this lecture we’ll discuss the identification of research gaps and research puzzles. This will guide the content of the lecture, which will cover the current debates about collateral damage in current operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as related academic research on epistemic duties, and data ethics in armed conflict. The lecture will finish with a discussion of how to approach a real-world problem (disagreements about the number of civilian casualties inflicted by various parties to the armed conflicts in Iraq and Syria) in an academic way, and how this approach differs from other types of research on the problem.

• Discussion Questions:
  • Is your research descriptive, causal, or normative? Why? Why not?
  • To what extent are members of a military coalition responsible for the civilian casualties inflicted by their allies?
• Readings:
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). Chapter 2, 3
  • One of:
    • Oakford, Samuel. Credibility Gap – UK Civilian Harm Assessments for the Battles of Mosul and Raqqa. Airwars, (2018). https://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/UK-Inquiry-into-Mosul-and-Raqqa-2018.pdf.
    • Woods, Chris. Limited Accountability: A Transparency Audit of the Coalition Air War Against so-Called Islamic State. Airwars, (2016). https://airwars.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Airwars-report_Web-FINAL1.compressed.pdf.

5.3 Theoretical Frame: Epistemic Approaches to War and Warfare

We’ll start this lecture by discussing what is meant by a theoretical framework, and how to figure out an appropriate research framework to tackle a given research problem. In this lecture I’ll discuss a number of different ways in which the issue of measuring civilian casualties can be approached from an academic perspective, and how each would influence subsequent research questions, and research methods. We’ll be covering a range of different approaches to the topic, notably historical debates about the problem of measuring war deaths, and public health approaches to the measurement of excess mortality during armed conflict, and the notion of epistemic duties in normative theory. Alongside this, we’ll look at the role of NGOs in the promotion of new standards for casualty reporting, and the politics of communicating war deaths.

• Discussion Questions:
  • What are the important theoretical commitments of your research?
  • How does the measurement of death shape our understanding of the nature of war?
• Readings:
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). At least one of chapters 4, 5
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). Chapter 6
  • Murray, C J L, G King, A D Lopez, N Tomijima, and E G Krug. “Armed Conflict as a Public Health Problem.” BMJ 324, no. 7333 (2002): 346–49. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.324.7333.346.

5.4 Research Question: Who Should Measure Which War Deaths, and How?

In this lecture we will discuss the role that framing research questions and hypotheses plays in shaping subsequent work. An important element of this is scoping research questions so that they are answerable in a given wordcount. As such, we’ll also discuss different kinds of academic research projects and outputs. As part of this, I’ll continue talking you through my own research and explain how I adjusted the scope to fit an article-length research output. As part of this, we’ll be looking at the how the twin general issues discussed last week (the measurement of war deaths and epistemic duties) can be combined to significantly narrow down the scope of inquiry. We will then look at the use of case studies as a means of testing or explaining theoretical issues. In this lecture we will therefore discuss underlying ideas about the epistemic duties of military organisations in terms of measuring the damage that they inflict in the course of operations.

• Discussion Questions:
  • What are the strongest counter-arguments to your preliminary research conclusions?
  • What duties to know exist in war?
• Readings:
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). At least one of chapters 7,8
  • Crawford, Neta. Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars. Oxford University Press, (2013). Chapter 9
  • DeNicola, Daniel R. Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know. MIT Press, (2017). Chapter 7

5.5 Implications: The Changing Observability of Armed Conflict

This lecture highlights three directions of future research from the same project. The point of the final lecture in this series is that it also provides each student some time to discuss how they see their own research fitting in with existing research, and how it could be taken forwards in radically different directions. This is an important thing to consider for longer research projects, and may help when it comes to your dissertation. In essence, after all is said and your analysis is done, how do you conclude a research project in a productive manner? At graduate level, it’s not about saying “I’m right, because x, y, and z”, it’s about knowing your material so thoroughly that you are able to make constructive connections to wider research, or discern interesting pathways for future research.

The three things I will be talking about in this lecture are the strategic implications of automated and autonomous recognition systems, ethics and emerging technologies, and data ethics in armed conflict. My hope is that you will see how each of these could naturally flow from the project we have covered in this series.

• Discussion Questions:
  • How have your ideas for your research project evolved over this term?
  • What might be the negative consequences of “war in a goldfish bowl”?
• Readings:
  • One of:
    • McDonald, Jack. “Data Ethics and Armed Conflict - Contemporary Problems Beyond the Just War Tradition” Working paper, (2019c).
    • McDonald, Jack. “War and Privacy Rights.” Working Paper, (2019b).