Casualty Recording and Agency after Life

Jeanette Richard-Ruiz, Virginia Tech

Casualty recording can be traced back to ancient times. However, it is the numbers that are remembered, reproduced and reified in history. It is not the individuals themselves. While soldiers’ lives are often documented, memorialized, and celebrated--even after death, civilian bodies lose their identity as reported statistics, and consequently lose their agency upon death. Access to mobile technology and the Internet make it possible to record casualties faster and in real-time of a conflict. This paper will discuss the similarities and differences between the Kosovo Memory Book and the Iraq Body Count--- an online database of casualties. This paper argues that as time passes and a body transforms its identity from civilian into casualty, the civilian body’s agency diminishes. By reducing the time it takes to publicly report the identity of the casualty, technology is also preserving the body’s agency. The Kosovo Memory book began documenting civilians in 2000 who were either missing or forcibly disappeared. The work was detailed, but slow and time-consuming. Data collection required local people to perform door-to-door interviews to gather information. The data was collected, analyzed and then written in a book that wasn’t published until 2011. The Iraq Body Count (IBC) launched in 2003 by activists outside of the conflict. IBC produced data that was immediately available to the public via the Internet. For the first time, casualty data was available to the public for all casualties in an on-going conflict. The availability of this data provided insight into the harm being done to civilians now—not in the distant past. The data also facilitated debate, and consequently political pressure to protect civilians. This paper will argue and offer analysis on whether temporality is a factor preserving the body’s identity and therefore, the agency of a body, in conflict.

See paper

 Presented in Session 148. Making States and Statistics