Professor Michael Spagat from the Department of Economics launches new free online course on Future Learn.

Calculating the number of deaths during a war is a difficult but necessary task - and having accurate information is crucial for political and societal debates and decisions.

This new free online course, which has been developed by Professor Michael Spagat from the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway with Every Casualty Counts, is available on Future Learn and will start on Monday 24 May.

Every Casualty Counts is an independent not-for-profit organisation, exclusively focused on promoting effective casualty recording in situations of armed violence.

This course is for anyone interested in war, history and politics and the use and abuse of numbers and statistics.

Speaking about the course Michael said: “Calculating the number of deaths during a war is a difficult, but necessary task - having accurate information is crucial for political and societal debates and decisions. Numbers are often misrepresented in the media and even academic journals. In some cases, there have been quite big mistakes".

He added that he hopes the course will engage with people who are involved in estimating war deaths, but also people who are interested in statistics and the use of numbers.

You can sign up for the course here.

About Professor Spagat: Michael Spagat has a PhD in Economics from Harvard and a BA in Economics and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences from Northwestern. He has held research/teaching posts at the University of Illinois, Brown University, the New Economic School in Moscow, and the Institute of Economics of the Academia Sinica. He has written extensively on war and teaches a year-long module on the economics of warfare.