States of Ignorance The Unmaking and Remaking of Death Tolls

States of Ignorance: The Unmaking and Remaking of Death Tolls Pre-formatted version of Rappert, B 2012 ‘States of Ignorance: The Unmaking and Remaking of Death Tolls' Economy and Society 41(1): 42-63 Brian Rappert University of Exeter ABSTRACT This article considers the complications and tensions associated with knowing about ignorance In particular it attends to how the social analysis of ignorance hazards being associated with its production In does so through questioning how the UK government contended the number of civilian deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion could not ‘reliably’ be known The twists and turns of official public statements are interpreted against back region government and civil service deliberations obtained under the British Freedom of Information Act Far from settling what took place, however, this material intensified the problems with analysts attributing and characterizing strategies for manufacturing ignorance From an examination of the choices, contingencies, and challenges in the way actors and analysts depict ignorance, this article then considers future possibilities for inquiry whereby social analysts can question their ignorance while questioning claims to ignorance Key words: Partial knowledge; armed violence; pragmatism; Freedom of Information; Iraq Author’s Comments: My thanks to Linsey McGoey, Richard Moyes, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants of the "Strategic Unknowns” conference at the Saïd Business School for their advice and assistance in the production of this article As elaborated in the Introduction to this special issue, recent years have witnessed renewed concern across many fields to the complex and intertwined relation between knowledge and ignorance The growing literature into the place of ambiguities, absences, undecidables, and uncertainties has examined the variants of ignorance (Smithson 1993), what they mean for the diverting, displacing, and denying of responsibility (McGoey 2007; Kyriakoudes 2006), and how claims to not know are argued (Stocking and Holstein 1993; Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) As part of this, unknowns have not simply been orientated to as ‘knowledge gaps’ that need to be filled Instead, relations of ignorance allow for the highly productive negotiation of identities, boundaries, and hierarchies Also, what is ‘unknown’ is not simply the result of a lack of efforts to establish knowledge Rather ignorance can be deliberately manufactured Attention to the knowledge-ignorance inter-connection has run along side related developments in thinking about the relation between transparency and concealment Herein, openness is not a condition that can be taken for granted, but rather a negotiated accomplishment rendered through mediating mechanisms that simultaneously produce non-disclosure (Vattimo 1992; Power 1999; Christensen & Langer 2005) While recent studies have elaborated the often nuanced relevance of ignorance for organizational life and social interactions, arguably they have been much less attentive to the meta-level question of how ignorance is produced through the analysis of ignorance Notions such as ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) and ‘ontological gerrymandering’ (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985) have been proposed in the past to depict what social analyses through selectively leaving out certain details Yet, the rich empirical and conceptual studies to date of ignorance have generally sought to produce knowledge about ignorance, rather than attend to how their work might be bound up with its reproduction This article takes as its central concern the tensions of knowing about ignorance Borrowing a long standing distinction in social constructivism (Bloor 1976), it examines the intertwined issues of the place of ignorance in the conduct of social ‘actors’ as well as in the claims making of ‘analysts’ of social actors Attending to the latter is of vital importance in the study of strategic unknowns That ‘ignorances’ or ‘negative knowledges’ are being placed under the label of ‘strategic’ speaks to the manner in which they are often regarded as products of intended or purposeful action Combining this starting concern with calculation with the added focus on the negative uses of ignorance offers a tempting project to analysts: unmasking how strategic unknowns are the outcomes of individual and institutional duplicity The efforts undertaken by the tobacco industry to evade a casual link between smoking and cancer is the archetypal example in this respect A danger with such a pursuit is that it projects a coherence in action and competence to actors which might well be unwarranted The two and twined aspects of the production of ignorance by actors and analysts are considered in relation to attempts to gauge the human costs of conflict Among the many aspects of the tolls of war, this article considers one: the assembly of civilian fatality figures This is done specifically in relation to the British government’s claimed understanding about the number of deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion In giving an account of Iraqi deaths, this article queries the state of ignorance at two levels: 1) The claims made government actors regarding the (im)possibility of producing fatality estimates; 2) The meta-epistemological level of how analysts can know about the ignorance production strategies of actors The ‘Enacting Ignorances’ section provides a chronology of deliberations by government officials, the examination of which provides many grounds for contending that ignorance about fatalities was deliberately manufactured to deflect political criticism In doing so, a goal of this section is also to ask what is at stake in how analysts orientate to claims about the production of unknowns Problems are identified with concluding officials sought to manufacture ignorance In the ‘Attributing Ignorance’ section these are expanded upon and complemented with additional considerations to call into question how analysts substantiate claims about strategic unknowns The final section offers a rethinking of research directions and questions attuned to the sensitivities of ignorance within the study of ignorance Freedom of Information Much the argument of this article is advanced through comparing official statements and other publicly available material against documents obtained through under the 2005 UK Freedom of Information (FoI) Act This Act was justified as part of attempts to open the traditionally closed off British political system to public scrutiny And yet, as argued elsewhere (Wasserstein 2001) and as will be evident in this case, FoI responses are characterized by limitations and vagaries that mark a highly managed form of disclosure The plainly fractured understandings enabled by FoI responses will be used to bring to the fore some of the more commonplace difficulties of knowing about ignorance More specifically, the article draws on three sets of overlapping requests made between 2008-2010 by the author, Richard Moyes (Landmine Action) and another (for more details1) In total, some 48 emails, letters, and other documents were obtained For the sake for comprehension, the timeline below lists the major events associated with producing estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths: March 2003 October 2004 November 2004 December 2005 October 2006 October 2006 January 2008 US-led invasion of Iraq First Lancet survey published Parliamentary statements on first Lancet study Iraqi government and parliamentary elections Second Lancet survey released Parliamentary statement on second Lancet study New England Journal of Medicine study published Enacting Ignorances 2004 From the start of the war until the autumn of 2004, government officials spoke of the unknown number of Iraqi deaths In response to parliamentary questioning, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Baroness Symons (2004a), provided one statement along these lines on 24 June (see also Ingram [2004]): There are no reliable figures for Iraqi civilian deaths since March 2003 The Iraqi Ministry of Health has informed us that the number of civilians killed in security incidents is 1,203 and 3,992 wounded dating from when statistics began on April 2004 However they reflect only hospital admissions and may not be comprehensive It is not possible to break these down into how they were killed or who may have been responsible It includes casualties caused by terrorist action By 17 November 2004, however, official statements suggested not only that reliable figures did not exist, but that it was not possible to derive such figures The then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (2004) argued that ‘In many cases it would be impossible to make a reliably accurate assessment either of the civilian casualties resulting from any particular attacks or of the overall civilian casualties of a conflict This is particularly true in the conditions that exist in Iraq.’ As a way into understanding how claims of ignorance figured in debates about Iraqi dead, this sub-section considers the background leading to the above contention of the British Foreign Secretary in November 2004 Based on the FoI responses the trigger for government and civil service public declaration of the impossibility of civilian deaths was a survey in the medical journal The Lancet released online in late October 2004 (Roberts et al 2004).2 This study, lead by a group at Johns Hopkins University, employed cluster statistical sampling techniques Using a baseline morality rate, the authors estimated 98,000 more Iraqis died than would have in the absence of the war (with a 95% confidence interval estimation range from 8,000 to 194,000) These numbers contrasted with those derived from other methods being used at the time.3 Notably, the “Iraq Body Count” relies on English language news accounts as well as other substantiated reports Over roughly the same time frame, it counted between 14,284 and 16,419 non-combatants deaths from military or paramilitary violence Certainly it is possible to cite evidence from the FoI responses obtained that suggest officials were deliberately working to manufacture ignorance (along the lines of Proctor 2008) in the face of the comparative large and media prominent estimates advanced by the Lancet study.4 One instance is a passage in a RESTRICTED security level letter from the Chief Economist of government ministry dated November 2004 The name of this advisor and his ministry were redacted from the released versions – though presumably he was from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)5 After discussing various aspects of the validity of the 2004 Lancet study, this Chief Economist commented: It might also be possible, as Gerald Russell has suggested, to try and validate the study’s pre-invasion estimate of mortality by checking it against unpublished [Iraqi Ministry of Health] health figures But there is (a) no certainty at this stage that this kind of work would invalidate the Lancet findings, or (b) any guarantee that if it does produce a difference answer, that the rejection of the Lancet findings would be conclusive This passage suggests particular findings were sought (i.e those that ran against the high Lancet findings) Likewise, inter-ministry email correspondence on November 2004 to formulate the official statement by the UK Foreign Secretary suggests officials tried to encourage public statements that would raise doubts about the estimation of 98,000 deaths In the exchanges, one official (name and ministry redacted) cited an October poll by the International Republican Institute (IRI 2004) It indicated that 22 percent of some two thousand Iraqis responded in the affirmative when asked: ‘in the past year and a half, has your household been directly affected by violence in terms of deaths, handicap or significant monetary loss’ Another individual (again name and ministry redacted) responded to the citation of this result: ‘The IRI survey seems to me to harm our argument rather than help, but it is certainly useful to know.’ Consistent with the intent to selectively disregard evidence which did not undermine the Lancet study, it has not been possible to find any mention of this IRI finding in subsequent public government statements about Iraqi dead Although grounds exist for maintaining that ministry staff sought to deliberately foster ambiguity surrounding the reliability of the Lancet study, it is difficult to assess and determine whether staff consciously intended to produce ignorance surrounding the study’s comparatively high estimations One complication is knowing what those under scrutiny knew In this case, it is uncertain to what extent the contentions about the lack of reliable figures stemmed from the intention of officials to create doubt, or from their own lack of knowledge about the possibility of estimations Save for fairly narrow methodological interventions by technical advisors, the 2004 deliberations obtained under the FoI action were not well informed by the history of attempts to calculate deaths in war Repeated uncertainty and confusion was expressed by individuals about the basic statistical matters under discussion Perhaps a more fundamental trouble in moving from text to strategy is the standing of language However otherwise diverse, many of the strands of what are called Discourse Analysis today treat accounts of the world as managed descriptions given in and for particular interactional settings (Lynch and Bogen 1996; Edwards 1997; Alvesson 2002; Blommaert 2005) When language is approached as a form of social action between a sender and an audience – rather than just a means of general representation – extracting out some stable, definitive meanings from words becomes problematic.6 In this regard, the quotations above relating to a desire to find grounds against the Lancet estimations need to be made sense of as part of ongoing internal exchanges between individuals These are laden with mutual expectations (e.g., about literalness), taken for granted understandings, varying levels of trust, organizational idioms, unspoken presumptions, etc (Arminen 2000).7 As such – and as in the case of the 2009 leaked emails about the ‘tricked’ manipulation of global warming data by researchers at the University of East Anglia – arguments that some are trying to dupe others can be queried for the way meaning gets attributed ‘out of context’ Furthermore, as Gilbert and Mulkay (1984: 2) argue, attributing definitive meaning to statements presumes that ‘the analyst can reconcile his version of events with all the multiple and divergent versions generated by the actors themselves’ In other words, social actors can produce contrasting accounts; sometimes differentiated along the forms of communication (e.g., formal writing, informal collegial banter, interviews, emails, etc) Those who take it as their role to decipher what is really meant must find a way of sorting this diversity Often this is done by establishing ‘linguistic consistency,’ as Gilbert and Mulkay suggest: what is taken as literally descriptive is that which is in line with what analysts judged to be the overall gist of the material available As a result, some statements are taken at face value while others are disregarded Moving on from my aforementioned impression of the overall drive towards doubting the Lancet death estimations to characterize the intentional ignorance production strategies afoot would likewise require sidelining certain statements made by officials; such as those that referred to a ‘genuine judgment’ that no reliable methodology was possible and that the Lancet study was ‘straight from the department of guesswork.’8 If these difficulties stemming from treating language-as-social-action pose challenges for analysis in general, then these are all the more acutely experienced where information restrictions are imposed Most of the names, many of the positions, and some organizational affiliations were redacted from the FoI released documentation.9 Such conditions of partial disclosure frustrate government openness leading to comprehension One possible response to the concerns about the interpretation of such ‘back region’ deliberations would be to place more analytical investment in statements made in front regions – such as the one given by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in relation to the Lancet article As these set out informed authorized positions for the public by named individuals, they might be treated as offering relatively fixed points for analysis And yet, trying to extract a stable reading is arguably problematic because of the equivocal meaning of key points Consider the 17 November 2004 statement by Jack Straw to the House of Commons So, with regard to the central question of the possibility of deriving figures for civilian casualties, Straw (2004) maintained both 1) that: In many cases it would be impossible to make a reliably accurate assessment either of the civilian casualties resulting from any particular attacks or of the overall civilian casualties of a conflict This is particularly true in the conditions that exist in Iraq and 2) that the hospital reports complied by the Iraqi Ministry of Health suggesting that there were 3,853 civilian fatalities from the military or terrorist action between April 2004 and October 2004 were the ‘most reliable available’ figures Arguably the meaning of ‘reliable’ was ambiguous It was both impossible to achieve reliable figures, but possible to specify the most reliable ones The slipperiness of this term makes it difficult to establish inconsistencies, even with other official statements For instance, on 17 November 2004, Baroness Symons read to the House of Lords the same assessment as given by Jack Straw to the House of Commons Yet, in response to questioning in the House of Lords, earlier on June 2004 she also had said: [Iraqi Ministry of Health] statistics are not reliable, as Iraqis often bury their deceased relatives without official notification/registration This has been particularly true during periods of heightened conflict The MoH does not therefore have accurate figures for civilian deaths or their causes for the past year (Symons 2004b) Determining whether this statement is consistent with the aforementioned ones she made on 17 November or 24 June 2004 would seem to hinge on the meaning given to the notions of ‘accurate (enough)’, ‘comprehensive (enough)’ and ‘reliable (enough)’ To complicate matters further, it appears that some of those considering official responses recognized a need for front and back region strategic management of what was said An internal FCO letter sent to 10 Downing Street on 14 October 2004 stated: The US have, like ourselves, stuck to the line that there are no comprehensive figures for civilians casualties and not comment on suggested figures The Embassy in Washington has asked for the US’s official estimate of civilian casualties in Iraq We still await the responses from the State Department and Department of Defense In sum, if we produce a figure that differs from the Iraqi government figures, we will have to defend it – and the way it was arrived at – before parliament and the media.WWWWW_WWWWW_WWWWWWW_WWWW_WWWWW_WWW W_WWWW We recommend that for the moment we continue to put our public emphasis on specific atrocities against civilians, such as the mass killing of Iraqi children in Baghdad on 30 September, and their attempts to thwart our efforts to stand up independent Iraqi security forces This passage would seem to indicate this FCO official (a) recognized the possibility that the US and the UK could derive civilian causality estimates; (b) believed the US had already produced one; (c) was unaware of the estimation; and (d) thought it was best to maintain a public line that it was not possible to derive a comprehensive figure With regard to (d), it was recognized that producing figures might require defending them To adhere to the stated recommendation to not comment on suggested figures would have the impact of reducing the need for detailed defense The passage suggests not treating government statements at face value because at least some individuals saw the need for the sort of calculative control moves of the kind Goffman (1970) deemed as ‘expression games’ While ministers Straw and Symons made seemingly tension-ridden claims about the overall possibility of producing reliable figures in their addresses to parliament statements, in relation to the 2004 Lancet report the specific challenges offered by them on 17 November centered on the limitations of the report’s data that were inputted into the statistical methodology Doubts were raised in relation to the said small sample size, the overall ‘limited precision’ of the data that was noted by the study’s authors, and the possibility of accurately attributing who was responsible for violence and who was a civilian The contrast between the Lancet study with the Iraqi MoH numbers was also cited as raising grounds for doubt Thus, while it was impossible to achieve ‘reliable’ figures for the UK, the most ‘non-reliable’ one could be identified In choosing to question the Lancet study at the level of the data, it was possible for ministers to disregard its findings without questioning the statistical clustering method employed – something technical advisors warned against in the FoI documentation obtained.10 Working at the level of data at least opened the prospect of reliable figures in the future – if the data could be improved And yet, this also sat uneasily against the aforementioned overall contention that reliable figures were impossible in the case of Iraq 2006 According to the FoI released material, another round of inter-ministry deliberation about Iraqi civilian deaths began in the autumn of 2006 with the publication of a second survey by Johns Hopkins University in The Lancet (Burnham et al 2006) on 12 October That work estimated 654,965 more Iraqis died up to that date than would have in the absence of the war (with a 95% confidence interval estimated range between 392,979 to 942,636) With this second study, it is possible to ask how UK claims developed from that in 2004 Immediate British government commentary on the 2006 study was highly critical and wide ranging On the day of its publication, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman was reported to have commented that: The problem with this is that they are using an extrapolation technique from a relatively small sample, from an area of Iraq which isn't representative of the country as a whole We have questioned that technique right from the beginning and we continue to so The Lancet figure is an order of magnitude higher than any other figure; it is not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate (Tempest 2006) Instead of accepting the estimations in the Lancet, the figures from the Iraqi MoH were said to be the only accepted ones On 19 October 2006 though the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Lord Triesman (2006), gave the following prepared answer to the House of Lords (see as well Ingram [2006]): My Lords, every civilian death is a tragedy and must be of concern in Iraq, as elsewhere However, we continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since 2003 Estimates vary according to the method of collection The figure of 655,000 given in the recent Lancet survey is significantly higher than other estimates, including those provided by the Iraqi Government We believe that the Iraqi Government are best placed to monitor deaths among their own civilians This statement carried on with certain tracks of contention in 2004: no reliable figures were available, estimates varied, and the Lancet study was out of line with others The statement differed though in that while the quality of the data was a central concern in 2004 official parliamentary statements, reference to it was not included within such statements in 2006 Through the FoI releases, it is possible to speculate about the causes and consequences for this omission Similar to 2004, this material from 2006 indicates civil servant advisors (from Department for International Development [DFID] and the Ministry of Defence [MoD]) recommended against criticizing the Lancet study’s methodological design (as seemingly done in the statement above by the Prime Minister’s official spokesman).11 In the case of the DFID advisor, grounds were given for why the 2006 Lancet study might have underestimated mortality.12 In addition, the advisors noted improvements to the data obtained; including the larger sample sizes, sampling techniques, and the use of enhanced death certificate verification When these advisers’ appraisals about methodological soundness later got out to the press, they were seized upon to indicate government skullduggery (Horton 2007) By not noting the improvements made to the data, the official statement by Lord Triesman failed to acknowledge how the 2006 Lancet study redressed 2004 ministerial criticisms The very brevity of the statement13 though arguably frustrates efforts to assess the grounds offered for Lord Triesman’s evaluation As another point of contrast between 2004 and 2006, instead of the (qualified) endorsement of Iraqi Ministry of Health figures, in 2006 Lord Triesman contended that ‘Estimates vary according to the method of collection’ This shift to methodological pluralism, the quality of the data in 2006 was diminished as a relevant consideration since the data was not the (only) source for the divergent deaths figures Yet, adopting this stance brought critical questioning during a debate in the House of Lords: Lord Marsh: My Lords, does the Minister agree that the methodology of this study was unique in the way in which it was pursued? It is difficult to see how the Government can take the line, “The study was done in a way which is well known, and it was done very well, but we don't think that it is worth very much” Lord Triesman: My Lords, that is not the view that I have put at all I said that there are different methods which have arrived at very different figures and that those methods also are legitimate The way in which data are extrapolated from samples to a general outcome is a matter of deep concern and merits considerable study rather than the denunciation of one method compared with another In pointing to the ‘deep concern’, the response by Lord Triesman appears to open up statistical methodologies to questioning in a manner that were arguably not subject to in 2004 official parliamentary statements that took data as their concern; though again what is being discussed might well be regarded as unclear Just what Lord Triesman’s statements should be taken to mean overall for the standing of death estimates is difficult to comprehend The monitoring of deaths was deemed a responsibility of the Iraqi government, and therefore, presumably, doable at some level As such, ignorance was framed in a way that further knowledge was attainable (as in Ravetz 1987) And yet, the suggestions of methodological pluralism undermined the prospects of sorting out said equally legitimate tallies In this thinking it might be said, following Norris (1994: 290), that the dead became ‘objections of deconstruction, figures impossible to verify and locate and therefore incapable of serving any intellectual operation other than that of the impossibility of determining their reality.’ What does seem certain though is that in practice the need for ‘considerable study’ mentioned in Lord Triesman’s reply was not part of an announcement that the UK would be commissioning such work 2007 The FoI released information obtained for 2007 included only two types of material: i) an email chain between two FCO officials and one from DFID, ii) along with a FCO checklist The December email exchanges appear to have pertained to a government Public Service Agreement regarding international conflict prevention and resolution As part of this attention to reducing the burden of conflict, an official from the FCO Iraq Group was tasked with compiling a bullet point checklist of the different measures of Iraq civilian deaths, an appraisal of their reliability, and the official UK statements made about them As with previously cited FoI material, the 2007 material raises basic concerns about the ignorance of British officials; in particular in relation to error and uncertainty So in relation to the former, for instance, the December two-page checklist (titled ‘Analysis of Iraqi Civilian Death Tolls’) included the following evaluations about the 2004 Lancet study: Advantages: - none Disadvantages: - Methodology deemed flawed by MOD’s Chief Scientific Adviser and FCO’s Chief Economist… 10 However, in the internal letters obtained by the author, while certain critical points were raised (mainly relating to data), the MOD’s Chief Scientific Adviser judged that the ‘design of the study is robust’ and a ‘Chief Economist’ noted above (presumably from the Foreign Office) concluded the statistical methodology ‘appears sound’.14 In relation to concerns about uncertainty, for instance, the checklist document suggested the basis for some Iraq government figures was unknown to the UK For both the Iraqi Ministry of Interior figures and joint Iraqi Ministry of Interior, Health, and Defence figures, it was written that no details were provided about how they were put together.15 So despite the UK proposing the Iraq government was best placed to monitor deaths, the former did not know how the latter was doing so And yet, while it seems appropriate to label these as instances of error and uncertainty, such characterizations may be ill-judged Especially given what seems to be the lack of knowledge displayed across the civil service regarding Iraqi deaths, the uncertainty about the Iraqi government methods for compiling death figures might well stem from confusion 2008 Post-2007, public commentary and debate about Iraq civilian deaths continued For instance, at the start of 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine published an interview survey conducted by various Iraqi organizations in collaboration with the World Health Organization (Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group 2008) From March 2003 to June 2006, it estimated 151,000 violent Iraqi deaths – including combatants and civilians This study does not appear to have lead to further activities in UK ministries No documents were released under the FoI Act relevant to this study Little public attention was given to the overall topic either A House of Commons parliamentary question in February 2008 about Iraqi deaths (Rennie 2008) brought a reference back to a 2007 statement by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs indicating: The Government not collate figures for civilian casualties in Iraq The Government of Iraq is best placed to monitor the numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties, but we continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003 as estimates vary according to the method of collection (Howells 2007) As such, the government did not endorse the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine but instead said estimates vary As in previous years, the British government statements in 2007 and 2008 identify the Iraqi government as institution that should be monitoring deaths As in previous years, there is no suggestion that this government might be divided about the desirability for or 11 compromised in its willingness to undertake such activities A number of commentators at the time though did propose internal and external political pressures bearing on Iraq and its agencies to not produce or to underestimate civilian death tallies (Brown 2008; Steele and Goldenberg 2008; Susman 2007).16 Neither was there an acknowledgement in the British government statements that it had or could have some bearing on what activities were undertaken by the Iraqi government Attributing Ignorance As explored in the previous section, with no figures of its own, British government responses about what could be known regarding civilians deaths stemming from the 2003 Iraq war included claiming no reliable figures existed, ‘reliable’ figures were impossible to derive, some figures were more ‘reliable’ than others, some figures were more unreliable than others, different methodologies lead to different tolls, and the job of producing figures was one for the Iraqi government This analysis has juxtaposed the twists and turns of public statements against back region government and civil service deliberations In doing so, ‘covering moves’ (Goffman 1970) by government officials to public health surveys have been identified These were likely to foment ignorance by: * seeking to raise doubts about only certain types of figures; * not acknowledging information that ran counter to this end; * proposing the need for meta-studies not then supported; * changing positions in unremarked upon ways; * using ambiguous terminology It has been possible to speculate about what these tactics have meant for political accountability Ambiguity in meaning, for instance, served to render it difficult for outsiders to know what was known by government officials and to carpet over internal ministerial disagreement and unawareness (see Eisenberg 1984) And yet, for all the ways in which this opens the UK government up to charges of willfully manufacturing doubt, the previous section has also sought to consider problems with analysts attributing and characterizing ignorance production strategies The rest of this section extends the treatment of these difficulties In relation to the topic under discussion, the incompleteness of the empirical data available stifles determining what took place While the FoI released material obtained provided glimpses into otherwise closed off bureaucratic deliberations, that these are only partial glimpses undermined the attempt to settle on their standing and import While many documents were made available, it is clear from ministerial responses that others were not Moreover, as this analysis drew on material from three overlapping sets of FoI requests, it has been possible get a sense of the variability in what becomes made public For instance, ministries made available documents the pertained to other ministries that the latter group did not release In other instances, documents released under more than one request had different redacted elements.17 The extract from a letter by a Chief Economist in the previous section, for example, had the title of ‘Chief Economist’ 12 redacted from one of the two released copies Sometimes email exchanges and documents were released with redacted elements blacked out, while at other times portions of said ‘relevant’ text were cut and pasted into FoI compilations In short then, access to some information has suggested grounds for the partiality of that information Such a condition should beg the question the limitations of any depictions of events made from FoI released (contrast this to BBC 2009) But more generally, this recognition raises questions about how social analysis can take place in situations of partial information With its glaring redactions and exemptions imposed by a formal system of control, the FoI makes explicit the conditions of partial information experienced more widely in social inquiry How to characterize and give a place to that which remains unknown is as problematic as it is prevalent (Smithson 1993) However it is not simply the case that the problems of analysts attributing ignorance strategies derived from incompleteness of empirical data The difficulties go far beyond certain material being blacked out Instead, the ‘back region’ correspondence obtained was highly productive – it added another set of material that had to be made sense of in relation to the production of ignorance So in this case, the correspondence obtained brought reasons to wonder whether officials were deliberately fashioning doubt or whether they were ignorant themselves of the issues at hand One way of handling such indeterminacies would be to adopt an understanding of the facts and then use that to interpret individuals’ actions For instance, in their examination of ignorance production, Oreskes and Conway (2008) start with the reality of anthropogenic global warming in order to question why and catalogue how sceptics are seeking to fabricate dubious doubt In relation to the topic of this article, it would be possible side with a particular type of estimation (such as those given in the Lancet studies) in order to critically evaluate government claims to the contrary (as done in Ellis 2009) Yet, reading back from ‘the facts’ in order to decipher who is trying to produce ignorance has severe limits In the case of Iraq, one limit is the disagreement evident Within popular and scholarly circles in the UK and US since 2003, much debate has taken place in academic and popular circles about the relative merits of methodologies for assessing civilian deaths from conflict, the appropriateness of their assumptions, and the reasons for statistical uncertainty (e.g., Bird 2004, Morely 2004, Badkhen 2006; Cockburn 2008) Scholars with different views on these matters have argued for the establishment of (their) figures as the authorative ones in order to end dispute (e.g., Daponte 2007; Brownstein and Brownstein 2008; Sloboda 2009) Yet, efforts by some to advance certain counts and methodologies as authoritative are arguably disputable (Dobbs 2007) Perhaps a more fundamental limitation of relying one ‘the facts’ to understand how ignorance is being formed in relation to Iraqi deaths though is that more is at stake than simply technical issues of how to count Rather, in the disputes about what can be said, 13 thoroughly political questions are involved about what lives should be counted Should, for instance, only deaths from violence to civilians be measured? What about indirect deaths due to the loss of sanitation or medical facilities? What about those deaths where it is not clear if it is a civilian or a combatant? Each of the attempts to calculate figures cited in this article have made different determinations of these questions; something often not even acknowledged in academic or popular analyses of Iraqi death tolls (see Cockburn 2008; as in BBC 2008; Steele and Goldenberg 2008; Ellis 2009) Beyond these case-specific difficulties of relying on ‘the facts’ to ground attributions of willful ignorance, such an approach has further problems For one, it highly restricts the range of topics, when they can be studied, and who can credibly this As well, starting with an understanding of which claims are true and which claims are false threatens to flatten out a sense how, as part of the unfolding controversy, claims were advanced about what could be or was known In the case examined here, while individuals traded certain terminology and evaluations as part of a joint debate, it is not at all clear whether the meaning of what was said was mutually agreed While the ambiguity of key terms – such as what constitutes ‘reliable’ – provides an analytical locus for the negotiated management of meaning, that ambiguity thwarts analysts being able to specify what was happening in detail Stated bluntly, the conditions that suggest the production of ignorance also frustrate specifying it Because of this ‘uncertainty about disagreement’, it is necessary to consider a second level order of ignorance involved in the study of ignorance: that being how the lack of certainty about the issues disputed should lead to analytical doubt about what is being doubted by actors in the first place In this situation of uncertainty about ignorance, it is questionable to try to characterize ‘what was going on’ and ‘what was meant by what was said’ through drawing on a predetermined sense of ‘the facts’ As well, as to label particular uses of ignorance according to a generic typology (as in Smithson 1993) would likewise beg many questions Overall then, the case of Iraqi civilian deaths has been used to suggest some of the difficulties associated with knowing about the manufacturing of ignorance Specifying this requires tackling varied conceptual and practical quandaries As part of this, it should be recognized that analysts wishing to attribute ignorance can end up employing many of the same argumentative techniques as those under study; such as brushing over ambiguities in the use of words, focusing on certain statements over others, making questionable presumptions to assign meaning, and offering definite claims in conditions of partial knowledge Those too could be questioned in terms of how they promote ignorance A Pragmatic Remaking The previous argument has suggested the need for an expansive recognition of ignorance and the limits to its analysis As Smithson (1993: 154) wrote: [I]gnoring ignorance does no one much good It is better to know and use our ignorance, not only to engender appropriate humility and caution regarding what 14 we consider established knowledge, but also to encourage the exploration, discovery, and creativity This article has sought to take these points to heart through attending to the role of claims to ignorance both in political life as well as in social research The latter challenges analysts regarding how we approach the study of ignorance Traditions of pragmatism have long taken as their concern how to go on in situations where indeterminacies, uncertainties, and doubts caution against carrying on as usual but frustrate deciding what to Dewey (1929) was particularly insistent that rather than engaging in a search for universal truths, the goal of inquiry should be to make situations manageable in order to find a way of improving them With their nuances and contingencies, expecting to fix down the meaning of public affairs is unrealistic and misguided As such, a rather modest notion of truth is sought Herein to ‘establish a truth pragmatically is to settle a controversial or complex issue for the time being, until something comes along to dislodge the comfort and reassurance that has thereby been achieved, forcing inquiry to begin again’ (Cochran 2002: 527) The overall emphasis in pragmatism of attending to uncertainty and doubt in public affairs and social inquiry is in line with the requirement suggested by the previous sections of this article; namely the need to find ways of acknowledging and working with ignorance as part of its study In relation to the specific topics of this article, the importance attached to practical interventionist inquiry in pragmatism is also in line with the previous analysis in relation to what is required to tackle seemingly complacent bureaucratic decision making obscured from view Building on the sense of fit, the remainder of this article asks how the study of ignorance in political life and in social analysis could be positively combined The goal is not to set out a fully fledged program for inquiry, but rather the more modest one of asking how pragmatist sensibilities could inform attempts to gauge the human costs of conflict In particular, what is sought is an experimental approach for inquiring about ignorance at the two levels that have been of concern in this article So, in recent years, some governments, inter-governmental organizations, and others have argued armed violence poses a major impediment to development and committed themselves to its reduction (UN SG 2005; UNDP & WHO 2005; SAS 2008; OECD-DAC 2008) In 2006, for instance, the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development was launched with a view to encouraging greater prioritization of armed violence reduction Among other goals, the 100+ nations in the Declaration have committed themselves to ‘achieve, by 2015, measurable reductions in the global burden of armed violence and tangible improvements in human security worldwide.’ With such initiatives, the need to gather evidence and devise means of measurement has been a central priority And yet, for whatever the progressive mandate of these activities, attempts to render violence measureable, and consequently reduceable, beg many questions How then might such initiatives be approached? 15 To begin with, much of the international emphasis on and action in improving surveillance and data-gathering capacity tends to be directed at developing countries (e.g., GD 2008b) This article has given reasons for why any deficiencies should not be levelled at them alone For all their apparent sophistication, governments such as UK have not undertaken or supported basic types of data collection, let alone used this in some purposeful fashion As a result, a crucial dimension for assessing international efforts to gauge violence will be how they touch highly major industrialized nations Taking this point of direction, it follows from the previous sections that attempts to establish the facts of armed violence in order to guide policy are likely to be fraught In relation to high level government initiatives designed to improve data-gathering capacity and international standards, one evident danger is that they become insular technocratic and abstracted exercises As Demeritt (2006) argued in relation to global warming research, attention to narrow technical issues of the comparative strength of methodologies and indicators can displace consideration of who needs to what The preceding discussion suggests the emerging initiatives to assess the human costs of conflict would likely be well served by being conceived as a process of transformative inquiry rather than an attempt to find and fix down a proper methodology In line with previous sections, there are many grounds for arguing figures about the costs of conflict are likely to be open for dispute That fallibility stems in part from the political contestability of what lives should be attributed to conflict Pragmatically then, rather than the search for definitive numbers, such efforts would be more sensible if attempts to gauge arm conflict were conceived as part of iterative cycles of reflection and intervention that lead to the generation of new understandings that could, in turn, suggest possibilities for subsequent reflection and interventions Such efforts would need to be located at the center various tensions, such as the need to invest credibility and trust in the empirical claims while also questioning their limitations and contingency What would be needed is ways of testing the ignorance of governments (and analysts) regarding the harms of conflict – and given the uncertainties noted at the end of the previous section, testing what is known about what is known about casualties and their consequences From the preceding analysis of ignorance, it is possible to propose angles for inquiry that might be helpful For instance, much of the UK positioning in relation to disputes about civilian deaths has amounted to refuting proposed figures by citing disagreement It seems justified though to argue that there is comparatively little in the way of substantive argument that backs up such occasional pronouncements of officialdom One way forward that could test this understanding is to revise current operating presumptions Activities that shift the onus for proof as part of current international efforts would be useful in this regard – so, those activities that lead to governments arguing for or against particular estimates Pressing them to so could be one way of illustrating the poverty of government responses, and thereby setting the stage for a next round of questioning 16 Such efforts should not just document deficiencies though Rather they should be means of making the unspoken presumptions and purposes of inquiry topics for attention As suggested in this article, much of the disagreement about Iraqi civilian deaths traded on notions about what constituted ‘reliable’ claims to knowledge Yet is not just the UK government that has brushed over the matter of what exactly is being sought in favor of advancing particular estimates or analyses of estimates (e.g., Horton 2007; Ellis 2009) Both those who have sought to claim no authoritative figures were available as well as those that have advanced authoritative estimates have sidelined the purposes for figures Therefore, progressively topicalizing what varied figures are for could provide one way of learning about the knowledge and standards of commentators It might also enable transforming what is seen as ‘feasible’ by way of producing estimates A pragmatist orientation would suggest that what counts as a better or worse by the way of inquiry should be open to revision Appropriate standards are going to depend on a sense of what can be done by way of intervention, and (in turn) the standards agreed will shape future interventions So from the previous analysis it was proposed that the political accountability of states for their use of force needs to be challenged and that further research could support such a move However, research interventions also need to be considered in terms of their consequences in relation to what gets rendered unknowable For instance, as mentioned in Section Two, a repeated concern of officials in FoI material released was the need to be ‘consistent’ Pointing out inconsistencies in government positions has been one of the bases for criticism Yet, this preoccupation may have unintended negative consequences In December 2007 correspondence one FCO official wrote: There is intense FOI and parliamentary interest in [Iraqi civilian deaths] – if we started using figures internally now as a measurement of progress, we would risk having to release them under an FOI request, which would contradict previous statements that we not collate or endorse any casualty figures Taken at face value, this passage suggests that the fear of being seen to change positions about measures of armed conflict was one reason for a reluctance to contribute to emerging policy initiatives to measure the costs of war If an accurate 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that work, inter alia, to assess the numbers and specific causes of civilian casualties resulting from armed violence perpetrated by UK forces and our relevant international partners?’ and ‘analyses or assessments have been made […] regarding methodologies for assessing the civilian cost of armed violence’ The second set consists of requests by the author in 2009-10 to the FCO, MoD, Department of Health, and Department for International Development that re-asked Moyes’ questions for Iraq The third is material posted on line at the FCO FoI website (see http://foi.fco.gov.uk/content/en/foi-releases/2009/lancet-report) A FoI request to the FCO indicated that this was given in response to a request about ‘the feasibility, accuracy, and results of any assessments made by the UK government of the number of direct and indirect casualties in Iraq’ with special reference to comment and opinions in The Lancet The materials are available at http://people.exeter.ac.uk/br201/ Though by no means was this the first intervention that drew critical attention to the issue of civilian deaths Others included the work of Iraq Body Count and Boyce et al (2003) For an overview of the varied efforts to assess deaths, see Chapter of Geneva Declaration Secretariat (2008) For an examination of the media reception of The Lancet studies, see Chapters 6-7 in Edwards and Cromwell (2009) This because the letter in question was released by the FCO and the Chief Economist of the FCO is cited as commenting on deaths in other correspondence In O’Neill (2006) another distinct but related argument is made about how access to information does not always ensure effective communication because audience not have the ethical and epistemic capacity to comprehend it This is all the more the case given the FoI Act only came into force in 2005 A non dated (but post-2004) released Foreign Office analysis of ‘African Conflict Statistics’ provided detailed grounds for concerns about the reliability of conflict statistics The names of officials were deemed ‘not relevant’ by the FCO to the questions posed by Richard Moyes; see Griffiths (2008) 10 It also opened a way for meeting the need repeatedly expressed in the FoI material to ensure that whatever was given by way of official assessment was consistent with the prior comments made by the Prime Minister Tony Blair (2004) On November he said that ‘we not accept the figures released by The Lancet last week at all.’ At least one case for consistency could made because it was the figures that were doubted by Blair, rather than the methodology per se 11 In 2010, the MoD released to the author a four page paper titled ‘Analysis of 2006 Lancet Article – Summary of Findings’ (undated and without an identified author) that was not cited elsewhere or released as part of the other FoI requests It likewise judged the methodology sound and (on balance) supported the study’s findings 12 In the case of 2006, these internal representations were publicized through the BBC World Service’s own FoI request in late 2007 (Bennett-Jones 2007) 13 Especially in contrast to Jack Straw’s 1600 word statement on 17 November 2004 14 See, as well, note 11 15 In relation to the latter it was written that ‘No information is given on how the figures are reached Our embassy in Baghdad thinks they are an average of MOH/MOI/MOD figures, however, all these departments reach their totals in different ways.’ 16 In addition, the aforementioned 2007 FCO checklist made brief reference to dispute about figures within Iraq 17 Differences which made it difficult for the author to comprehend what legitimate grounds existed for the redacting of material  ... unknowns The final section offers a rethinking of research directions and questions attuned to the sensitivities of ignorance within the study of ignorance Freedom of Information Much the argument of. .. New England Journal of Medicine study published Enacting Ignorances 2004 From the start of the war until the autumn of 2004, government officials spoke of the unknown number of Iraqi deaths In... twined aspects of the production of ignorance by actors and analysts are considered in relation to attempts to gauge the human costs of conflict Among the many aspects of the tolls of war, this