About the author(s):
Lauren Gould is Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies and the principle investigator and project leader of the Intimacies of Remote Warfare programme and the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare programme at Utrecht University, and the project Assembling the Western Way of War in Afghanistan and Beyond at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. From a critical conflict and war studies perspective her trans- and interdisciplinary research programmes trace and conceptualize the changing character of the Western way of war and its impact on civilian harm and democratic accountability. Gould has conducted fieldwork amongst Western militaries and in conflict zones across the Middle East and East Africa. Her aim is to use the knowledge her teams generate to inform academic, public and policy debates.
This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need.
As the character of warfare is always evolving, so too does the type of impact it has on civilian harm. This blog reflects on the changing character of the Western way of war in the 21st century; how it has been legitimized in terms of its technological superiority and precision and why its impact has increasingly been measured in terms of its civilian casualties. Subsequently, building on a recent transdisciplinary research project I co-led on the US-led coalition war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, I argue that we need to move beyond a narrow focus on civilian casualties to account for the consequences of war. Instead, in our ‘After the Strike’ research report we define and operationalize a research agenda on the ‘direct’, ‘reverberating’ and ‘compounding’ forms of civilian harm (Azeem et al. 2022). I conclude by reflecting on how in our case making visible and public the lived experience of war allowed for its de-sanitization, the questioning of its logic and an increase in political and legal accountability.
Remote warfare and its effects

Remoteness in all its modalities – from distancing to outsourcing – has become a characteristic feature of the Western way of warfare in the 21st century. In the wake of the horrors of the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, from 2010 onwards Western interventionism has increasingly been characterised by a shift away from boots on the ground. Instead, it relies heavily on (unmanned) airstrikes, while on the ground small (private) military training teams train local forces to do the actual fighting and dying on the battlefield (Watts and Biegon 2017, at 1). Alongside the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya and NATO’s transitions to Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan in 2015, the 2014 US-led Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) against ISIS is an exemplary case. In this military operation , Western allies conducted over 34.000 airstrikes – dropping over 100.000 bombs – while training and financing local Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian (militia) forces to engage in active combat with ISIS across Syria and Iraq (McInnes 2016). These remote strategies have led to a significant decrease in returning Western military body bags. According to the US Defence Casualty Analysis System, between 2014 and 2022 the US military lost just 20 soldiers under OIR. This is a significant decline compared to the over 3,481 US military lives lost during the US-led ground invasion Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2012.
Western governments emphasise that these remote strategies and technologies not only spare the lives of Western military personnel, but also that the constant application of surveillance technologies, proportionality principles and precision guided bombs allows them to safeguard friendly civilians on the ground (Demmers, Gould, and Snetselaar 2020). However, as Shaw foresaw in 2005, while relying on drones and long-range bombardments will keep soldiers safe, it inevitably leads to errors of targeting and delivery that kill innocent non-combatants.
Competing narratives of civilian casualties
Faced with large numbers of civilians being killed by Western airstrikes across the Middle East and Africa, and dissatisfied with how Western militaries assess these casualties, monitoring organisations and media outlets, such as Bureau of Investigation, Airwars, Amnesty International and The New York Times, have increasingly developed innovative remote sensing techniques to count civilian casualties (Demmers, Gould, and Snetselaar 2020). With few returning military body bags, they hope that their total civilian casualty body count will raise political questions about the violent impact and effectiveness of Western interventions. Western governments in turn fear that these numbers will be so challenging that they will threaten to ‘break’ the established ‘precision war’ narrative, suggesting to journalists, readers, and viewers the need for a radically different understanding. As illustrated elsewhere (Gould and Stel 2022), Western governments therefore often either outright deny the existence of civilian casualties, rarely share information about airstrikes in the name of security, hide behind coalition partners to defend non-disclosure, and sometimes go as far as stating that it is altogether impossible to make any unambiguous claims about the number of civilian casualties. The resulting assertions about the ‘true’ number of civilian deaths between monitoring organisations and Western governments are tellingly disparate. For instance, in our case of OIR, Airwars’ current conservative estimate is that between 8,220 and 13,299 civilians have likely been killed. The Coalition itself currently ‘confirms’ only 1,417 non-combatant deaths, while individual members such as the UK, France and Belgium uphold they have killed zero civilians in Iraq and the UK acknowledges just one in Syria.
Civilian casualties as numerical indicators
The political significance of counting the bodies of the civilian dead by civil society and the subsequent strategic denial, secrecy and ignorance of them by Western governments is that the democratic debate about the impact of war becomes heavily focused on the question of who knew, what, when about civilian casualties and not on the actual infliction of violence and its political aftermath (Gould and Stel 2022). Moreover, as Gregory warns:
The process of counting these casualties cleanses them of any blood and gore, transforming them into numerical indicators that can be tabulated into neat little rows or converted into pretty little graphs. As the horrifying effects of this violence – not to mention the emotional distress it causes to those left behind – is completely erased from view, there is no sense that the primary ‘purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue’ (2021, at 205).
The solution, therefore, is not merely to devise more accurate or precise ways of counting civilian casualties, but to look for alternative modes of accounting for the pain and suffering that is inflicted during these wars. As Sylvester(2012) argues, the study of war needs to be approached from the perspective of those experiencing its bodily effects. Gregory (2021) adds, “we need to name those who are killed or injured, we need to find ways of amplifying their stories – not just stories about their grisly demise but also stories about who they were as individuals and the lives that they left behind”. Then, we have to find ways to integrate these accounts of the actual injury sustained by actual people in contexts of war – with accounts of how we come to see what we see, know what we know, and think what we think about war (Holmqvist 2013, at 548).
How to define and measure civilian harm?
How can we study “what it means to be a human being living in the condition of war” in the 21st century (Holmqvist 2013, at 551)? Although there is now a subset of academic voices calling for the need to define and narrate the intimate realities of civilian harm caused by contemporary warfare, there is little conceptual and empirical practice to draw on. For our recent After the Strike research project on the civilian harm caused by a 2015 Dutch Coalition airstrike on a ISIS car bomb factory that lead to a huge secondary explosion in Hawija, Iraq, – we therefore drew heavily on work done by NGOs and international organizations and introduced a set of definitions and indicators to establish whether and when we see different forms of harm at work. We define civilian harm as follows:
Civilian harm consists of all negative effects on civilian personal or community well-being caused by use of force in hostilities. Effects can occur directly (death, physical or mental trauma, property damage) or occur indirectly through the destruction of critical infrastructure, disruption of access to basic needs and services, or the loss of livelihood. (Bijl and Van der Zeijden 2020, at 4)
We also aimed to advance conceptual and analytical clarity by further operationalising the term civilian harm by making a distinction between three types of civilian harm effects: direct, reverberating and compounding. Direct effects include the “immediate and (usually) physical impact directly from the armed conflict” (Holewinski et al. 2021, at 4); reverberating effects are “those effects that are not necessarily caused directly by the attack, but are nonetheless a product thereof” (Robinson and Nohle 2017, at 2); and, finally, compounding effects occur when two or more separate events or forms of harm […] combine to create an exponentially more harmful effect for civilians (Bijl, Wels and van der Zeijden at 245). Simply put, a physical injury would be classified as a direct effect, whereas any loss of income resulting from an inability to work as a result of that injury would be considered a reverberating effect. A compounding effect then occurs when an increase in medical expenses related to the injury comes on top of this loss of income, leading to a further breakdown of the quality of life.
Using transdisciplinary research to trace and make publicly visible the lived experience of warfare
It is one thing to define civilian harm, it is quite another to find ways to conduct research on how on-site fieldwork on civilian harm in settings of afterwar. We therefore built a transdisciplinary research team across institutions, including scholars at Utrecht University and NGO practitioners from PAX and Al-Ghad in The Netherlands and Iraq respectively, drawing on previous collaborations, allowing us to gain access and build trust with respondents in Hawija, and integrating knowledge across academic and non-academic stakeholders on remote warfare and civilian harm. In tracing and mapping the various interconnected ways in which civilians in Hawija were harmed by the 2015 Dutch airstrike we studied both numbers (amount of deaths, injuries, internally displaced persons, and material damage) and stories of how civilians survived and attached meaning to their experiences, applying a variety of data-collecting strategies. We relied on a careful content analysis of information as reported to us by civilians during fieldwork in Hawija, documented in death certificates, and used both Google Earth satellite imagery and primary and secondary sources to corroborate and help contextualize this information.
We concluded in our After the Strike (2022) report that:
“With the shift to remote warfare, and a reliance on airstrikes, destruction compounds civilian harm in new ways. The Coalition made a grave mistake to target the industrial neighbourhood of Hawija in 2015. First, because this was in fact a densely populated urban area, with lots of civilians living on or near the site of destruction. We discovered that at least 85 civilians were killed in the attack and hundreds more injured. And second, because it was evident that the strike would not instantly drive out ISIS from the city. As a result, civilian victims of the strike continued to live and suffer under the occupation of this extremely repressive and violent rebel regime for more than two years. Civilians were stuck under ISIS and a continued threat of Coalition bombardments, as well as often denied access to vital resources, rendering it nearly impossible for injured civilians to get medical attention. And all of this remained largely unrecognized by the Coalition and the Netherlands for years to come”.
This was often referred to as extremely frustrating and painful for the civilians in Hawija. It was not until 2019, when investigate journalists discovered that the Netherlands carried out the attack, that the Netherlands took responsibility for the strike. It was not until our report came out in 2022 that they acknowledged the immense levels of harm that had occurred. In our case, tracing and making publicly visible the compounding civilian harm effects of the strike in Haijwa seven years later led to an increase in political and legal accountability. The Dutch Ministry of Defence announced a new civilian harm transparency and accountability policy in the same week our research report was released, since a civilian harm reporting portal has been established, and our report now stands as central evidence in a civil court case of the Hawija victims versus the Dutch state. This is the first ever court case against the US-led coalition, and the Hawija victims had their voice heard in the court room in The Hague.
In line with the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s call to examine “individuals’ and communities’ manifold lived experiences of conflict through qualitative research”, our study demonstrates that the direct, reverberating and compounding effects of remote warfare can and should be traced. Moreover, it illustrates that by bringing in these lived experiences into what we know and how we talk about the wars waged in our name in democratic societies can and does have an impact on public, policy and legal debates.