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Enumerating Civilian Harm: Experience, Ethics, and Erasure

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Craig JonesORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Abstract

The article examines efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) to enumerate the harm its forces inflicted on Syrian and Iraqi civilians between 2014 and 2018. Drawing on more than 1,300 declassified civilian harm assessments, this article examines the rationale behind the decision to count civilian casualties, the policies that governed how civilian casualties were counted, and what CJTF-OIR officials did with the data collected. Although accurate counts are critical to ethical debates, we show that, on their own, these counts are insufficient when it comes to recognizing the harm inflicted upon civilians and holding militaries accountable. We trace coalition metrics back to concerns about consequence management, showing how martial considerations about optimizing violence—rather than moral concerns about constraining violence—governed the enumerative enterprise. We argue that the way the coalition previously counted civilian casualties erased certain harms from view, including the indirect, cumulative, and reverberating violence that civilians suffered during this conflict. Furthermore, we contend that these numerical indicators tell us little about how civilians experience these harms, a lack of which can become an impediment to ethical consideration. Finally, we contrast the coalition count with Airwars figures to reveal both the numerical discrepancies between the different counts and differences in how these figures have been used. We contend that counting casualties is critical, but also complicated, contestable, and—at times—too constrictive.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Gregory T, Jones C, Kinsella HM, Shah N, Aburas L

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Ethics & International Affairs

Year: 2026

Volume: 40

Issue: 1

Pages: 51-77

Online publication date: 13/07/2026

Acceptance date: 01/07/2026

Date deposited: 09/09/2026

ISSN (print): 0892-6794

ISSN (electronic): 1747-7093

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679426100446

DOI: 10.1017/S0892679426100446

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