It allocates violent conflicts to three different intensity levels. It does not limit itself to the losses of the regular armies but also includes civilian casualties of direct physical violence. The conflict data base developed by the University of Uppsala in Sweden offers a further development of the definition by COW.

Most quantitative approaches, however, have not yet been able to compete with the popularity of the threshold of 1,000 killed soldiers defined by Small and Singer. Some researchers have therefore suggested not taking the absolute number of deaths as a critical benchmark, but rather their proportion of the total population of the affected country. One must assume that the number of deaths as a result of violent conflicts is perceived and assessed differently depending on the size of the affected or involved population. Other studies point to the difficulties resulting from the reference to an absolute number as threshold value. Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff have a threshold of 100 deaths in their data base on failed states and add the criterion of at least 1,000 combatants per conflict party. Weart for instance uses the criterion of 200 killed soldiers per year to classify a violent conflict as a war. The COW definition is quite controversial. To exclude genocides and sporadic massacres from this definition, both parties to the conflict must have organised themselves to commit collective violence, or the party with the least combatants must have inflicted at least five percent of their own losses on the opponent. According to this approach, a war is any violent conflict with at least 1,000 killed combatants per year. This project attempts to assemble statistical data on wars that have been waged globally since 1816. The most known and influential approach was developed by David Singer and Melvin Small in the framework of the ‘Correlates of War (COW)’ project at Michigan University. Quantitative definitions of “war” require that the number of direct or indirect deaths caused by violent clashes crosses a certain threshold. One can differentiate between quantitative and qualitative approaches to a scientific definition of war. Definitions of war and conflict typologies Definitions of war

War vs armed conflict in usa