War: Is it getting more hellish, or less?
These experts snipe at each other in academic journals and papers and are engaged in a statistical arms race of their own, sampling, adding and modifying databases to try to shed light on questions that have implications beyond the academic world. The disagreements begin with how fatalities are counted and then diverge more widely. Authors from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway (PRIO) in collaboration with Sweden’s Uppsala University, say that since the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of East-West rivalry in 1989, civil wars, “though often intractable and devastating, have produced fewer battle deaths than their Cold War counterparts.” They relied on estimates…
from WN.com – World News
