Michael Spagat | |
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Born | c. 1960 (age 63–64) |
Academic background | |
Education | |
Thesis | Supply Disruptions in Centrally Planned Economies [1] [2] |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Economist |
Institutions | |
Website | mikespagat.wordpress.com |
Michael Spagat (born c. 1960) is an American-British economist and researcher of war and armed conflict. [3] [4] He is currently a professor of economics at Royal Holloway,University of London. He is also a board member of Every Casualty Counts and Action on Armed Violence. [3]
At Northwestern University,Spagat had obtained a BA in mathematical methods in the social sciences and economics in 1982. He was awarded a PhD in economics at Harvard University in 1988. He had held two positions as assistant professor of economics,one at Brown University from August 1987 to July 1990,and another at University of Illinois from July 1990 to August 1997,before joining Royal Holloway,University of London in September 1997,where he is still appointed at as of 2024. He is currently a professor of economics at Royal Holloway,University of London.
His current research addresses armed conflict,universal patterns in modern war,fabrication in survey research,the Dirty War Index civilian casualties in the Iraq War and problems in the measurement of war deaths. [3] [4]
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same state . The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies. The term is a calque of Latin bellum civile which was used to refer to the various civil wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC.
A civilian casualty occurs when a civilian is killed or injured by non-civilians, mostly law enforcement officers, military personnel, rebel group forces, or terrorists. Under the law of war, it refers to civilians who perish or suffer wounds as a result of wartime acts. The term is generally applied to situations in which violence is committed in pursuit of political goals. During periods of armed conflict, there are structures, actors, and processes at a number of levels that affect the likelihood of violence against civilians.
Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of February 2019, the IBC has recorded 183,249 – 205,785 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
Estimates of the casualties from the Iraq War have come in several forms, and those estimates of different types of Iraq War casualties vary greatly.
Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site's editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media's coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately".
An insurgency is a violent, armed rebellion by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare against a larger authority. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well-equipped, regular military force state adversary. Due to this asymmetry, insurgents avoid large-scale direct battles, opting instead to blend in with the civilian population where they gradually expand territorial control and military forces. Insurgency frequently hinges on control of and collaboration with local populations.
The Lancet, one of the oldest scientific medical journals in the world, published two peer-reviewed studies on the effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation on the Iraqi mortality rate. The first was published in 2004; the second in 2006. The studies estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the occupation, both direct and indirect.
The Iraqi civil war was an armed conflict from 2006 to 2008 between various sectarian Shia and Sunni armed groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Mahdi Army, in addition to the Iraqi government alongside American-led coalition forces. In February 2006, the insurgency against the coalition and government escalated into a sectarian civil war after the bombing of Al-Askari Shrine, considered a holy site in Twelver Shi'ism. US President George W. Bush and Iraqi officials accused Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) of orchestrating the bombing. AQI publicly denied any links. The incident set off a wave of attacks on Sunni civilians by Shia militants, followed by attacks on Shia civilians by Sunni militants.
The Iraq War, sometimes called the Second Persian Gulf War was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011.
Les Roberts is an American epidemiologist. He was the first winner of the Centers for Disease Control's Paul C. Schnitker Award for contributions to global health. He became prominent in the news just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election for his study estimating that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the Iraq war at a time when official U.S. government counts were much lower. When a 2006 follow-up study confirmed the report, U.S. President George W. Bush dismissed it, saying the approach had been "pretty well discredited", without explaining how.
John Anthony Sloboda OBE FBA is Research Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he currently leads research on the Social Impact of Making Music. He is also one of the founders of the Iraq Body Count project.
The tactics of the Iraqi insurgency have varied widely. Insurgents have targeted U.S. forces and Iraqi government forces using improvised explosive devices, ambushes, snipers, and mortar and rocket fire, in addition to using car bombs, kidnappings or hostage-taking, and assassinations.
Oxford Research Group (ORG) was a London-based charity and think tank in Cambridge Heath, working on peace, security and justice issues. Its research and dialogue activities were mainly focused on the Middle East, North and West Africa, as well as influencing UK and international security policy.
The term military medicine has a number of potential connotations. It may mean:
On Friday, 14 September 2007, ORB International, an independent polling agency located in London, published estimates of the total war casualties in Iraq since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. At over 1.2 million deaths (1,220,580), this estimate is the highest number published so far. From the poll margin of error of +/-2.5% ORB calculated a range of 733,158 to 1,446,063 deaths. The ORB estimate was performed by a random survey of 1,720 adults aged 18+, out of which 1,499 responded, in fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq, between August 12 and August 19, 2007. In comparison, the 2006 Lancet survey suggested almost half this number through the end of June 2006. The Lancet authors calculated a range of 392,979 to 942,636 deaths.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is a data collection program on organized violence, based at Uppsala University in Sweden. The UCDP is a leading provider of data on organized violence and armed conflict, and it is the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. UCDP data are systematically collected and have global coverage, comparability across cases and countries, and long time series. Data are updated annually and are publicly available, free of charge. Furthermore, preliminary data on events of organized violence in Africa is released on a monthly basis.
In armed conflicts, the civilian casualty ratio is the ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties, or total casualties. The measurement can apply either to casualties inflicted by or to a particular belligerent, casualties inflicted in one aspect or arena of a conflict or to casualties in the conflict as a whole. Casualties usually refer to both dead and injured. In some calculations, deaths resulting from famine and epidemics are included.
Michael John "Mike" Williams is an international relations scholar, former advisor for the Department of State, and former Congressional candidate for the 5th District of Connecticut. Williams is the author of numerous books focusing on foreign affairs. In 2006 he was elected a 'Young-Leader' by the Atlantic Bridge (Atlantik-Bruecke) foundation dedicated to developing US-European relations. Since 2008, Williams has been a faculty member in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he presently holds the rank of Reader.
Debarati Guha-Sapir is an Indian epidemiologist and public health researcher based in Belgium. She is the director of the Université catholique de Louvain Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.
Casualty recording is the systematic and continuous process of documenting individual direct deaths from armed conflict or widespread violence. It aims to create a comprehensive account of all deaths within a determined scope, usually bound by time and location.