Sex, drugs, and body counts: The politics of numbers in global crime and conflict

摘要

In her 1991 novel, Gates of Ivory, Margaret Drabble has a character write of twentieth-century conflicts that: 'the figures for what happened in the Congo are not satisfactory. Between 12 and 32 million died there. [Also noted] are the deaths of 800,000 Armenians, six million Jews, about three million in Bangladesh, some 20 million in the labour camps of the Soviet Union, two million in Vietnam, and between one and three million in Cambodia… The words "between", "about" and "some" are all underlined in red ink.