@bastianherre
Politics & Society Lead @ourworldindata.org. I make research on democracy, human rights, and conflict easier to access and understand. he/him Check out my work: https://ourworldindata.org/team/bastian-herre
Merci beaucoup!
Malheureusement, nous ne pouvons pas utiliser les travaux du PRIO et de l'UCDP, car ils ne prennent pas en compte les décès dus aux maladies et à la famine résultant des conflits.
Mais je suis d'accord, ce livre est excellent!
I work there, and I'm afraid we don't have that data — but I agree it's a great source! 😄
Thanks a lot for the pointer!
I think Pinker indeed uses Matthew White's work, the research by R.J. Rummel, and Wikipedia.
But for that, he has been heavily criticized:
www.jstor.org/stable/48581...
I can't use the usual suspects of UCDP, Correlates of War, and Project Mars because those don't look at the overall death toll.
This would be for a bird's eye visualization, so the estimates could be (very) rough.
Even tolls for the 20 deadliest conflicts of the last 200 years would be great.
Hey Bluesky hivemind! What are the best data sources for the overall death tolls of wars?
So not just dead soldiers, but also civilians, and deaths from disease and starvation due to the fighting.
Are Necrometrics and Wikipedia as flawed as they seem — or do they actually hold up to some scrutiny?
Yes, this shows the number of countries.
I agree it would be even better to show the number of people affected. But as far as I know, there's no historical data on this.
However, the organization Walk Free provides estimates for how many people have been affected in recent years:
www.walkfree.org
You can now find a short thread about the article here:
bsky.app/profile/bast...
Read more about the measurement challenges, our data source V-Dem, and how we built on it in our new article, jointly with @eortizospina.bsky.social and @maxroser.bsky.social:
ourworldindata.org/slavery
Summarizing changes of this scale in a single chart is challenging. Forced labor can take many different forms; legal rules and real-world practices often don’t match, and no country is completely free from forced labor.
The decline of forced labor is one of the biggest social and economic changes in history. It gave many millions of people much more freedom to live their lives. This shows that large changes to our societies and economies are possible—even those that were once unimaginable.
What the chart shows has been well documented in the many excellent books by historians and social scientists. What we add to this is a quantitative, bird’s-eye perspective on the global history of slavery and forced labor.
To measure this specific form of large-scale forced labor, we rely on expert assessments from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social, based at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.
It shows for each point in time how many countries had not yet abolished “large-scale” forced labor, meaning forced labor that was common and entrenched—tolerated, enabled, or imposed by authorities, rather than isolated abuse.
Many governments have ended their own use of forced labor, changed laws, and now prosecute those who use it. Some forms of forced labor and human trafficking still exist—but they are much less common than in the past.
The chart summarizes how these massive changes unfolded across the globe.
Slavery and forced labor have become less common over the last 250 years. Line chart of the number of countries that had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor. In 1789, 165 of the 174 countries covered had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor. In 2024, it was 9 countries. Annotations on important cases, such as China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, say more about the history of slavery and forced labor.
✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view
For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different.
The decline of slavery and forced labor is one of the biggest social and economic changes in history.
In a new article, we provide a quantitative, bird’s-eye perspective.
We show that almost all countries have ended large-scale forced labor, often surprisingly recently.
ourworldindata.org/slavery
Map showing tens of thousands of protests across the US between Trump's inauguration last year and January 31, 2026.
The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.
That would be great!
My email address is: bastian@ourworlindata.org
Thanks a lot!
Thank you! I did look at their work — but they (understandably) seem to have focused on objective measures of *electoral* democracy (with the possible exception of the number of journalists killed).
Oh, yes — I also think that such data would likely still come from scholars/experts, as the government can't be trusted in many places.
At the same time, UCDP's conflict data, for example, is collected by experts — but it doesn't rely on expert *surveys*, and instead uses (primarily) news reports.
Does anyone have ideas for “objective”, non-expert-survey indicators of liberal democracy, even if they are incomplete or flawed?
Is there cross-national data on the number of people a government has extrajudicially killed, how often a court has struck down government actions, or similar?
Sad to see that the CIA’s World Factbook has been shut down.
I remember first coming upon it during high school and marveling that it had important data for every country in the world, accessible to everyone.
It was my Our World in Data before Our World in Data.
www.cia.gov/stories/stor...
Chart titled "the many costs of the Syrian civil war". It consists of eight small line charts of deaths due to fighting, all deaths, deaths of children under 5, internally displaced people, international refugees, GDP per capita, the share in extreme poverty, and the share undernourished between 2004 and 2024. It shows that the civil war didn't just kill hundreds of thousands due to fighting, but also increased deaths overall (especially those of young children), displaced millions, halved average living standards, and created extreme poverty and widespread undernourishment. Data sources include UCDP, the UN, Eurostat, OECD, IMF, World Bank, and FAO. The chart is licensed CC BY to Our World in Data.
The Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and caused poor health and widespread poverty—
Most of our work on war and peace focuses on the people killed directly in the fighting.
I wrote a new Substack! "The quiet collapse of surveys: fewer humans (and more AI agents) are answering survey questions" laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-quiet-...
20 years ago, more than 500 million people in India lived in extreme poverty.
10 years ago, it was over 300 million.
Three years ago, it was less than 100 million.
There’s some conversation around the exact numbers — but the overall trajectory is just amazing.
By way of preparing for teaching and making sense of current events, I spent today trying to synthesise the demand-side literature on democratic backsliding (see figure below). The starting point of most of this literature is simple: Do voters punish politicians who violate democratic norms, or do
The power of data: newly released statistics indicate that lending to developing countries is less risky than assumed.
As a result, these places might get hundreds of billions more in loans over the next decade:
www.cgdev.org/publication/...
We are happy to release the Paths to Power Dashboard. It is the perfect tool for politics nerds!
You can find it here: ptp.isv.sv.uio.no/ptp/
It allows you to explore governments from 1966-2021 using the PtP and WhoGov datasets. See examples below.
The app has been programmed by Stuart Bramwell.
I argue in this piece that the nonprofit sector should be thinking more about the counterfactual when assessing fundraising success: winning a $2M competitive bid over capable peers advances the cause less than convincing someone to donate $1M they'd have spent on a yacht.
