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Resumo

Attempts to quantify conflict are flourishing like never before. From political science departments to policy think tanks, defense lobbies, and general staffs, the availability of data and refinement of statistical techniques promise new insight into the causes, conduct, and consequences of war. An abundance of evidence, coupled with advances in computing, has in turn revivified scientistic approaches to the study of combat. Critics, meanwhile, argue that a narrow fixation on the countable—at the expense of qualitative interpretation and theoretical insight—may yield skewed assessments, and data-collection by state actors raises concerns about surveillance and automated killing. Yet comparatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of these developments on how war is understood and conceptualized. What ontology of war, what vision of human subjectivity and historical contingency does 'big data' imply?

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