Rethinking Battle Deaths as Metric of Armed Conflict

For the majority of the years I have been a student of and professor of the study of violent political conflict we have measured the magnitude of violent conflict on battle deaths.  We have decided primarily whether a conflict is a militarized dispute or a war based on how many uniformed deaths there are in a calendar year of conflict.  A few years back Steve Saideman pointed out an obvious oversight to me regarding categorization of violence, notably that improvements to medical treatment in the field and at front area medical units meant more survivors that would have been deaths in previous decades.  Also, if a conflict is a civil war or other intrastate conflict, uniformed battle deaths only occur on one side of the conflict.

Today I was perusing Political Violence @ a Glance and was greeted by this piece by Tanisha Fazal. Fazal echoes thoughts that Saideman first voiced to me a few years back.  She breaks down four reasons for lower death rates in conflict zones and suggests that we may need to redesign our measurement of magnitude of violent political conflict to consider what we can compare and cannot compare.  For my two cents, Fazal is correct, it is time to redesign the measures and reconsider whether or not battle deaths is the best sign of conflict magnitude in the contemporary era.