The Costs of Cooperation: Civilian Casualty Counts in Iraq

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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 undermine 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.