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Speaker:
Prof. Stephen B. Long

This event is part of an event series „Fachbereichskolloquium Politik- und Verwaltunswissenschaft“.

This project fills a gap in existing data available for systematic analysis by scholars interested in war outcomes.  Several well-known data collection efforts, such as data sets from the Correlates of War project (COW) and the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), provide data on total casualties for each combatant in interstate conflicts from 1816-2001, but none of the existing data sets provide information about who inflicted which casualties on whom. In bilateral wars, this is a straightforward question, as the cause of any casualties is clearly the other combatant. However, for the many multilateral wars in history, total casualty numbers do not give any useful information about which states paid higher costs in the conflict relative to their gains and how states performed against each other. The LERD project provides directed casualties data and the resulting loss-exchange ratios (LERs) for all wars involving more than two combatants between 1816 and 1990. The first article using these data will appear in a forthcoming issue of International Interactions, and the entire data collection is available at https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~slong/LERD.html.