The Costs of Cooperation
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The Costs of Cooperation Civilian Casualty Counts in Iraq Claire Lauterbach Department of Political Science Duke University email: [email protected] © Claire Lauterbach, 2005 - 2007* (5,917 words) This article is a revised version of a paper originally written for PS158/PPS181, "Non-State Actors in World Politics," in Fall 2005. It has been accepted for publication in International Studies Perspectives, one of the peer-reviewed journals of the International Studies Association, and is currently slated to be forthcoming in the November 2007 issue. Claire Lauterbach will receive her B.A. in political science (international relations) from Duke University in May 2008. She is a recipient of a University Scholarship for interdisciplinary academic merit, and a member of the inaugural class of the Baldwin Scholars, a women's leadership initiative. She has served as a research assistant for the National Security Archive, and was awarded a fellowship by Humanity in Action for research on minority rights in Poland. * Author's note: I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers of International Studies Perspectives for their constructive comments. I am grateful to Tim Büthe and Alex Downes at Duke University for their advice and assistance. I also thank my interview subjects for providing the insights and comments central to this study. ABSTRACT Non-state actors—including a wide variety of non-governmental organizations, international organizations, research institutions, and groups of concerned citizens—have offered estimates of the destruction of human life during the most recent war in Iraq. Since 2003, these groups have independently produced widely divergent estimates of the human cost of war, provoking a storm of political controversy and doubts about the validity of their work that undermines the stated objectives of many of the groups. Building upon theories of transnational issue advocacy, this study seeks to address the empirical and theoretical puzzle of the lack of active cooperation among this set of normatively-motivated transnational political actors. The nascent civilian casualties regime reveals that commonality of purpose among non-state actors within a regime cannot simply be assumed, demanding a more nuanced analysis of how "frames of meaning" must be actively constructed. Key terms: civilian casualties, non-state actors, Iraq INTRODUCTION In the wake of World War II, the Geneva Convention of 1949 explicitly established the norm that civilians deserved to be protected during war (Chesterman, 2001). Implicitly reaffirming the salience of the norm of protection of civilians during war, Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesperson, recently commented that "we never target civilians," though he also noted that "[we] have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths" (Cassella, quoted in Yacoub et. al., 2003). In fact, despite repeated expressions of concern over the loss of innocent life, the United States has never had a policy of tallying the civilian deaths that result from its military endeavors abroad. The stalemate and violence that characterized the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and ensuing years of military occupation has led to renewed calls for accountability, or at least accounting, for civilian deaths resulting from military campaigns. Non-state actors— including a variety of non-governmental organizations, international organizations, research institutions, and groups of concerned citizens—have taken up the burden of tallying deaths and offering estimates of the destruction of human life. The security situation in most of Iraq makes reliable data collection logistically difficult. Furthermore, as Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives argues, "the noncombatant status of civilians cannot be simply assumed" (Conetta, 2003) in a zone of guerilla war in which combatants lack an effective central command and are interspersed in residential areas. A door-to-door survey of civilian casualties would not only be very difficult to implement, but would also require copious amounts of funding.1 Despite the 1 Such tactics form the methodologies of several prominent groups, such as the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict (CIVIC), who also express concern about chronic funding shortages. 1 acute logistical difficulties caused by the lack of security, a collection of non- governmental and international organization actors conducted at least nine distinct studies involving the collection of data on civilian casualties in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2005. The discrepancies in the reported number of civilian casualties left the studies vulnerable to accusations of political bias and faulty methodology, inadvertently fueling the argument that an estimate of civilian dead was not feasible. In commenting on the accuracy of various studies of civilian casualties, military spokespersons frequently highlighted the perceived impossibility of assessing the accuracy of independent surveys (NPR 2005b) by citing one study's tally against another to highlight the potential inaccuracies of both (BBC 2005).2 The organizations tallying civilian deaths in Iraq thus had strong incentives to band together and pool their resources in joint body count initiatives. Joint efforts would have made it easier for them to overcome logistical difficulties and therefore might have allowed them to arrive at a more precise or more comprehensive count. Arriving at and presenting a single joint estimate of the number of civilian dead, might have allowed the groups to increase their collective influence and enabled them to counterbalance the de- legitimizing comments of military spokespersons and the popular media. Moreover, these normatively-motivated groups appear to share a common goal, namely to create an accurate death toll for the conflict, so their failure to cooperate on joint initiatives is a genuine puzzle. 2 I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the inherent difficulty of counting civilian deaths by highlighting the continued disagreement over the death tolls of the 1991 intervention in Kuwait and World War II. The current disagreement over civilian death tolls for Iraq is not a historical exception. However, this study offers an explanation of what may otherwise be dismissed as random disagreement in the case of the Iraq civilian casualties regime. 2 My study seeks to explain this cooperation failure. Specifically, I analyze the factors involved in each group's decision to undertake its initiative to provide an estimate or a tally of civilian casualties of war in Iraq—and to do so by itself—in order to explain the lack of coordination between various organizations dealing with civilian casualties. I examine a variety of potential explanatory variables. For instance, I examine each organization's sources and amount of funding. The theory of non-governmental issue advocacy articulated by Cooley and Ron (2002) posits that non-cooperation among non- governmental actors (in their case humanitarian NGOs) reflects competition among them for the same pool of public resources, necessary to cover their operating costs. Yet, the operating costs of "body count" initiatives can be an impediment to effective gathering of data. The material constraints of limited funding sources could also imply a further incentive for like-minded groups working within the same sphere of issue advocacy to pool their resources and jointly produce studies of civilian casualties, thus reducing transaction costs. It is therefore not clear theoretically whether funding competition could explain the apparent lack of coordination among the disparate groups conducting casualty counts, and I will show empirically that many of them were not even competing for the same resources. I also examine several further potential explanatory variables beyond sources and amount of funding: geographical location, structure and level of institutionalization, political stance regarding the war, and methodology. I find none of these to be a necessary and/or sufficient explanation for non-cooperation between the various groups that sought civilian casualty counts in Iraq. Instead, I find that in the case of civilian casualty counts for Iraq, actors who appeared to have comparable objectives in fact 3 harbored differing conceptions of their epistemic goals—some, for example, viewed their work as producing tallies of actual deaths, others as representations of the breakdown of health infrastructure in a country at war, or as estimations of total deaths from a variety of causes over a period of time. In this respect, the different actors view themselves as providing fundamentally different contributions to the body of knowledge regarding the state of civilian deaths in Iraq. The actors often reject comparison and the active pooling of resources that has characterized collaboration between actors within many issue- oriented advocacy networks, such as the transnational human rights networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998:97-102). Consequently, theories that root non-cooperation among non- state actors in purely material constraints—such as competition over funding from the public sector—ignore vital ideational concerns that in turn engender differences in methodology, financing, and other logistical aspects of the different non-state actors' works. The sources and amount of funding sought out by the body count initiatives often reflect the diverse goals they hold in conducting the research and corroborate the epistemic roles that they have defined for themselves within the