Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts

The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict

Peter Andreas, Kelly M. Greenhill, Peter Andreas, Kelly M. Greenhill

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457067
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Big, attention-grabbing numbers are frequently used in policy debates and media reporting: "At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia." "There are three million child soldiers in Africa." "More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." "Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year." "Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP." "Internet child porn is a $20 billion-a-year industry."

Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naively or deliberately accept highly politicized and questionable statistical claims about activities that are extremely difficult to measure. As a result, we too often become trapped by these mythical numbers, with perverse and counterproductive consequences.

This problem exists in myriad policy realms. But it is particularly pronounced in statistics related to the politically charged realms of global crime and conflict-numbers of people killed in massacres and during genocides, the size of refugee flows, the magnitude of the illicit global trade in drugs and human beings, and so on. In Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and policy analysts critically examine the murky origins of some of these statistics and trace their remarkable proliferation. They also assess the standard metrics used to evaluate policy effectiveness in combating problems such as terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and the drug trade.

Contributors: Peter Andreas, Brown University; Thomas J. Biersteker, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies-Geneva; Sue E. Eckert, Brown University; David A. Feingold, Ophidian Research Institute and UNESCO; H. Richard Friman, Marquette University; Kelly M. Greenhill, Tufts University and Harvard University; John Hagan, Northwestern University; Lara J. Nettelfield, Institut Barcelona D'Estudis Internacionals and Simon Fraser University; Wenona Rymond-Richmond, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Winifred Tate, Colby College; Kay B. Warren, Brown University

1

Introduction

the politics of numbers

Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Albert Einstein

We live in a hyper-numeric world preoccupied with quantification. In practical political terms, if something is not measured it does not exist, if it is not counted it does not count. If there are no “data,” an issue or problem will not be recognized, defined, prioritized, put on the agenda, and debated. Therefore, to measure something—or at least claim to do so—is to announce its existence and signal its importance and policy relevance. As Deborah Stone observes, “Measures imply a need for action, because we do not measure things except when we want to change them or change our behavior in response to them.”1 How exactly we go about measuring things and what we decide to measure are similarly important.

The political use of numbers is readily apparent across a broad range of domestic and international policy issue areas.2 Indeed, some numbers are so politically sensitive and divisive that their release to the public can provoke charges of political motivation. This was recently dramatized in the British immigration minister’s accusation that the office of national statistics was “playing politics” with population figures when it released data on the size of the foreign born population. The Tories, in turn, accused the government of “bullying” the statistics office and attempting to “suppress” embarrassing numbers.3 The political importance of numbers is equally evident in the U.S.-led global “war on terror.” Alan Krueger and David Laitin argue that not only is the counting of terrorist attacks “becoming as important as the unemployment rate or the GDP,” but is now also highly politicized, with yearly State Department reports becoming “glossy advertisements of Washington’s achievements in combating terrorism” that are nevertheless marred by dubious statistical claims, glaring methodological inconsistencies, and opaque measurement procedures.4

The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are thus the stuff of politics. Because quantification is politically consequential, it can also be highly contentious. Both proponents and opponents of any given policy will marshal reams of data to bolster their position and to weaken support for rival positions. For instance, if those formulating the numbers think the issue at hand is a big problem “they want a big number, and if they want to minimize it, they want a small number.”5 If consumers trust or favor the numbers they are given, they call them “estimates” or “best guesses”; if they do not, they call them “cooked” or “fudged.” Some statistics are, as Joel Best puts it, simply “born bad”—they are based on made up or dubious data. Others become distorted, accidentally or intentionally, through carelessness or mutation during replication.6 Still others “go bad” when causality is ascribed to mere correlation, suggesting the existence of important, potentially manipulable, cause-effect relationships where no such relationships exist.7

Statistics—both good and bad—are often uncritically accepted and reproduced because they are assumed to have been generated by experts who possess specialized knowledge and who know what they are doing. As one journalist—in defending the controversial 2006 study, published in the Lancet, that suggested that well over 600,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion—put it: “This was, after all, not a group of high school students handing out questionnaires at a Baghdad bazaar. These are scientists from a respected public health school—Johns Hopkins—conducting a study funded by another respected school—MIT.”8

Moreover, once produced, numbers are not dependent on their creators to be perpetuated and legitimated. The public announcement of an impressively large sounding number, regardless of its origins or validity, can generate prominent press coverage, which in turn legitimates and perpetuates the use of the number. As George Orwell once quipped: “I heard it on the BBC is almost the equivalent of saying ‘I know it to be true.’”9 Conversely, skeptical treatments of statistics tend to receive significantly less media attention. This is due in part to the fact that many people are relatively innumerate. They have trouble thinking critically about statistics and overly rely on the presumed expertise of their producers. As Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, conceded after admitting he had publicly weighed in on the results of the Lancet study without having actually read the report: “I’m not a statistician. I don’t really understand statistics. I try to stay away from numbers as much as possible.”10 And as Blastland and Dilnot have lamented, “Too many find it easier to distrust numbers wholesale, affecting disdain, than to get to grips with them…. [Indeed], a well-known writer explained to us that he had heard quite enough numbers, thank you—he didn’t understand them and didn’t see why he should.”11

Yet, given the chronic and pervasive nature of political use and abuse of numbers, it behooves consumers of numbers to assess them with a critical eye and ask hard questions about their origins, even if doing so requires consumers to step outside their numeracy comfort zones. It likewise behooves producers of numbers to think harder about their sources of data, the conclusions they draw from these data, and the assumptions on which they are predicated. At a minimum, as Sarah Sewall, former director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights put it: greater and more systematic interrogation of politically relevant statistics could introduce “some accuracy and some temperance to the [most] far-flung allegations, both from the left and the right.”12 The alternative—namely, turning up one’s nose “at evidence in case it proves inconvenient”—results in “bad policy, bad government, gobbledygook news, and it ends in lost chances and screwed-up lives.”13

The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict

Some of the most heated and high profile political battles are over phenomena that are exceptionally difficult to measure and quantify, whatever the bona fides of those doing the measuring. One such realm is that of armed conflict, where competing estimates of combatant and noncombatant death tolls, war-related atrocities and the size of refugee and internally displaced populations can bring parties to blows, as well as imperil the governments deemed responsible for them. In the context of ongoing struggles not only on the battlefield, but also for influence over the hearts and minds of friends, foes, and fence-sitters alike, the incentives to politicize, and to systematically inflate or deflate, what data does exist are myriad. In the case of war-related refugee flows, for example, governments that find themselves hosting refugees may face powerful incentives to inflate or deflate the numbers of displaced in order to attract international aid or, conversely, to forestall potential anxiety within their own populations.

Contemporary armed conflicts by their very nature often occur in dangerous and difficult to access terrain, among hostile parties, making acquisition of accurate conflict-related statistics especially arduous. Consider, for example, the fact that most of the coverage of the 1994 Rwandan genocide focused on the humanitarian disaster that beset those Hutu who fled to Zaire in its aftermath rather than on the horror show that was the bloodbath itself. Consequently, estimates of the total number killed during the genocide still vary by as much as half a million people, from under 500,000 to well over one million.14 To make matters worse, in many parts of the world the relevant data gathering apparatuses may be internally inept, externally obstructed, or simply corrupt—and thus engaged in politicizing population data (e.g., through skewed census taking)—even before the outbreak of hostilities; the situation can hardly be expected to improve under fire.15 Among other problems, hospital and morgue reporting systems are often disrupted, while separating combatants from noncombatants can be problematic even under the best of conditions.

Another realm in which the acquisition of good data is particularly problematic is that of illicit transnational activities, such as the smuggling of drugs and people. Given the type of activity being measured, the quality of statistics is inherently suspect.16 After all, the success of clandestine border crossings depends on not being detected and thus they are designed to be as invisible as possible; getting good data is correspondingly difficult, to say the least. Moreover, “organized crime” and illicit activities have long possessed a particular quality that inspires both fear and awe in the public and in governments and engenders a peculiar willingness to accept mythical claims about the size and magnitude of lurking dangers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, lurid media exposés of the alleged “white slave trade,” dominated by Chinese opium traffickers and warlords, threw the authorities in England, the United States, and Australia into a moral panic—despite the fact that little evidence ever surfaced to confirm the existence of such a vast transnational trade.17

Statistics also come into play in the politics of measuring efforts to combat illicit cross-border activities, such as numbers of arrests, seizures, asset forfeitures and confiscations. These numbers often have more to do with political imperatives and bureaucratic incentives than actual deterrence. For instance, a long history of high apprehension numbers (often repeat arrests) of unauthorized migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border has not necessarily reduced entry attempts. But it has made it possible for border patrol agents to boast that they make more arrests than any other federal law enforcement agency—and p...

Table of contents

• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Politics of Measuring Illicit Flows and Policy Effectiveness
• 3 Trafficking in Numbers
• 4 Numbers and Certification
• 5 The Illusiveness of Counting “Victims” and the Concreteness of Ranking Countries
• 6 Counting the Cost
• 7 Research and Repercussions of Death Tolls
• 8 The Ambiguous Genocide
• 9 Accounting for Absence
• 10 (Mis)Measuring Success in Countering the Financing of Terrorism
• 11 Conclusion