Casualty counts are often controversial, and thorough research can only go so far in resolving such debates—there will almost always be missing data, and thus, a need to draw inferences about how comprehensively violence has been recorded. This article addresses that challenge by developing an estimation strategy based on the observation that violent events are generally distributed according to power laws, a pattern that structures expectations about what event data on armed conflict would look like if those data were complete. This technique is applied to estimate the number of Native American and US casualties in the American Indian Wars between 1776 and 1890, demonstrating how scholars can use power laws to estimate conflict size, even (and perhaps especially) where previous literature has been unable to do so.
AndreasPeterGreenhillKelly, eds. 2010. Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2.
AsherJana. 2013. “Using Surveys to Estimate Casualties Post-conflict.” In Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, edited by SeyboltTaylor B.AronsonJay D.FischhoffBaruch, 97–122. New York: Oxford University Press.
3.
AxelrodAlan. 1993. Chronicle of the Indian Wars: From Colonial Times to Wounded Knee. New York: Prentice Hall.
4.
BellMichael J.GillespieColin S.SwanDanielLordPhillip. 2012. “An Approach to Describing and Analysing Bulk Biological Annotation Quality: A Case Study Using UniProtKB.” Bioinformatics28 (18): i562–i568.
5.
BlackhawkNed. 2006. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
BurnhamGilbertLaftaRiyadhDoocyShannonRobertsLes. 2006. “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey.” Lancet368 (9545): 1421–28.
8.
CallowayColin G.2003. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
9.
CedermanLars-Erik. 2003. “Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles.” American Political Science Review97 (1): 135–50.
10.
ClausetAaronShaliziCosma R.NewmanMark E. J.. 2009. “Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data.” SIAM Review51 (4): 661–703.
11.
ClausetAaronWoodardRyan. 2013. “Estimating the Historical and Future Probabilities of Large Terrorist Events.” Annals of Applied Statistics7 (4): 1838–65.
12.
ClausetAaronYoungMaxwellGleditschKristian Skrede. 2007. “On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events.” Journal of Conflict Resolution51 (1): 58–89.
13.
ClodfelterMicheal. 2008. Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1494-2007. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
14.
DelayBrian. 2008. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
15.
DykstraRobert R.2003. “Body Counts and Murder Rates: The Contested Statistics of Western Violence.” Reviews in American History31 (4): 554–63.
16.
FischerHannah. 2010. Iraq Casualties: U.S. Military Forces and Iraqi Civilians, Police, and Security Forces. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.
17.
GohdesAnitaPriceMegan. 2013. “First Things First: Assessing Data Quality before Model Quality.” Journal of Conflict Resolution57 (6): 1090–108.
18.
HämäläinenPekka. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
19.
HayesBrian. 2002. “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.” American Scientist90 (1): 10–15.
20.
JewellNicholas P.SpagatMichaelJewelBritta L.. 2013. “MSE and Casualty Counts.” In Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, edited by SeyboltTaylor B.AronsonJay D.FischhoffBaruch, 185–212. New York: Oxford University Press.
21.
KlingnerJeffSilvaRomesh. 2013. “Combining Found Data and Surveys to Measure Conflict Mortality.” In Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, edited by SeyboltTaylor B.AronsonJay D.FischhoffBaruch, 147–164. New York: Oxford.
22.
LacinaBethanyGleditschNils Petter. 2005. “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths.” European Journal of Population21 (2-3): 145–66.
23.
LacinaBethanyGleditschNils Petter. 2012. “The Waning of War Is Real: A Response to Gohdes and Price.” Journal of Conflict Resolution57 (6): 1109–27.
24.
LumKristianPriceMeganGuberekTamyBallPatrick. 2010. “Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimation: A Case Study on Lethal Violations in Casanare, 1998-2007.” Statistics, Politics, and Policy1 (1): 1–26.
25.
Manrique-VallierDanielPriceMegan E.GohdesAnita. 2013. “Multiple Systems Estimation Techniques for Estimating Casualties in Armed Conflicts.” In Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, edited by SeyboltTaylor B.AronsonJay D.FischhoffBaruch, 165–182. New York: Oxford University Press.
26.
MichnoGregory F.2003. Encyclopedia of Indian Wars: Western Battles and Skirmishes, 1850-1890. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press.
27.
MichnoGregory F.MichnoSusan J.. 2008. Forgotten Fights: Little-known Raids and Skirmishes on the Frontier, 1823 to 1890. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press.
28.
NewmanM. E. J.2005. “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf’s Law.” Contemporary Physics46 (5): 323–51.
29.
NunnallyMichael L.2007. American Indian Wars: A Chronology of Confrontations between Peoples and Settlers and the United States Military, 1500-1901. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
30.
ObermeyerZiadMurrayChristopher J. L.GakidouEmmanuela. 2008. “Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: Analysis of Data from the World Health Survey Programme.” British Medical Journal336. Published electronically June 26, 2008. Accessed March 26, 2014. http://www.bmj.com/content/336/7659/1482.
31.
PinkerSteven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.
32.
PruchaFrancis Paul. 1969. The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846. New York: Macmillan.
33.
RatjarSteve. 1999. Indian War Sites: A Guidebook to Battlefields, Monuments, and Memorials. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
34.
ReddyMarlita A.1993. Statistical Record of Native North Americans. Detroit, MI: Gale.
35.
RichardsonLewis F.1948. “Variation of the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels with Magnitude.” Journal of the American Statistical Association43 (244): 523–46.
36.
RichterDaniel K.2001. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
37.
RundleJohn B.HollidayJames R.GravesWilliam R.TurcotteDonald L.TiampoKristy F.KleinWilliam. 2012. “Probabilities for Large Events in Driven Threshold Systems.” Physical Review E86 (2): 021106.
38.
SeyboltTaylor B.AronsonJay D.FischhoffBaruch, eds. 2013. Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press.
39.
SilverNate. 2012. The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t. New York: Penguin.
40.
SpagatMichael. 2010. “Ethical and Data-integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality in Iraq.” Defence and Peace Economics21 (1): 1–41.
41.
SpagatMichaelMackAndrewCooperTaraKreutzJoakim. 2009. “Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation.” Journal of Conflict Resolution53 (6): 934–50.
42.
SturtevantWilliamgen. ed. 1978-. Handbook of North American Indians, 20 vols. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
43.
UtleyRobert M.1967. Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian 1848-1865. New York: Macmillan.
44.
UtleyRobert M.1973. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian 1866-1891. New York: Macmillan.
45.
WebbGeorge W.1939. Chronological List of Engagements between the Regular Army of the United States and Various Tribes of Hostile Indians which Occurred During the Years 1790 to 1898, Inclusive. New York: AMS Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
