ABSTRACT
War has decreased in frequency in our time. Based on counting armed confl icts between and within states, IR analysts can claim that we live in a less warlike era than, say, during the Cold War period of the twentieth century (Gleditsch, 2008; Gleditsch et al., 2002; Newman, 2009; Mueller, 2004; Goldstein, 2011). Of course, that fi nding relies on certain assumptions, a key one often being that states are the main actors involved in war, the key participants. Such studies can also assume that casualties are counted properly (see Butler, 2004b; Melander et al., 2007) and that war takes recognizable forms. Yet it is abundantly clear that war is trickier to recognize, count, and tally up than it was in earlier times or under earlier state-centric understandings of war.1 There are so many participants in today’s wars that it can be diffi cult to determine which one among them is “the” main actor whose presence determines that war is taking place; at the very least, there can be guerrilla forces, networked organizations, private fi rms, states, and mixed state and nonstate coalitions involved (Abramson and Williams, 2010; Leander, 2012; Stanger, 2009). Wars also always involve people, whose locations with respect to war, and experiences with it, are diverse and yet signifi cant for them, their societies, international relations, short-and long-term outcomes of wars, and the prospect of future wars. And then there is the thorny problem of reckoning with casualties in war, which some IR accounts use as a measure of war intensity. The problem there, as Judith Butler (2004b) aptly reminds her readers, is that some war deaths are counted and grieved and many others are ignored – because deaths of everyday people in wars “over there” are collateral rather than important damage for the counters to tally.
