Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Paola Vesco, Senior Researcher, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Estimates of the number of people directly killed in Sudan’s civil war vary widely, in part because counting casualties in active conflict zones is extremely difficult. In 2025, for instance, one conflict monitoring organisation reported around 19,000 direct deaths from political violence across Sudan. Other research teams put the toll at more than 70,000.

Conflict researcher Paola Vesco and her team have developed a model that helps measure the uncertainty around such conflict death estimates. Their approach takes into account the tendency of conflict datasets to underestimate fatalities, and provides a more realistic range of possible death tolls. They explain how their model could improve estimates in conflicts like Sudan’s.

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What do we know about the number of dead in Sudan?

The number of people killed in Sudan’s war since it began in April 2023 remains contested. Deaths in 2025 have been especially hard to establish as communications were cut and humanitarian access was blocked.

In 2025, fighting intensified as the Rapid Support Forces – a paramilitary group which has fought the Sudanese army for control of the state since 2023 – advanced in Darfur and North Kordofan. Civilian deaths and displacement rose.

In February 2026, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the Rapid Support Forces’ killings in El-Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide.

The group’s capture of El-Fasher in the Darfur region in October 2025, after an 18-month siege, marked a significant territorial and strategic shift in the war. It consolidated the Rapid Support Forces’ control over much of Darfur and strengthened their position in western Sudan. It was also one of the war’s deadliest episodes.

ACLED, a global conflict monitoring organisation, reported around 19,000 deaths, which it describes as a conservative minimum count of deaths directly caused by political violence in Sudan in 2025.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, a research team at Uppsala University that has recorded conflict deaths worldwide for decades, estimated that attacks against civilians killed at least 60,000 people. More than 10,000 died in fighting between the army and armed groups.

Drawing on survivors’ reports, satellite imagery and other evidence, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab estimates that at least 60,000 people were killed during and after the paramilitary group’s capture of El-Fasher between late October and the end of December 2025.

Even worse, these figures capture only direct deaths from violence in Sudan. Many more have probably died from disease and starvation, as the Rapid Support Forces built earthen walls around El-Fasher in an effort to starve out the population.

Why are the estimates so different?

The true number of war deaths can never be known with certainty, but scholars understand reasonably well why estimates vary.

Much of the difference across reports stems from how organisations select and handle sources.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s estimate of 60,000 killed in El-Fasher draws directly on Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab. It is corroborated by independent reporting from Sudanese media, NGOs and UN agencies.

Beyond this “best” (most likely) figure, Uppsala’s programme also keeps a “high” estimate (75,000), reflecting the upper end of Yale’s assessment, and a markedly lower “low” estimate to flag that the exact number of deaths is uncertain.

ACLED, on the other hand, reports a single fatality number. When sources disagree, it takes the most conservative figure.

The differences in the estimates of deaths also stem from how monitoring organisations process information.

Both the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and ACLED record the exact date and location of violent incidents when these are available. But ACLED only counts deaths that can be linked to a specific incident. Deaths reported only as a broad total, without identifiable incidents, may therefore be left out. Uppsala’s programme instead records them as a “summary” event, which presents the total death toll over a longer period or a wider area, rather than for a single attack.

This apparently simple rule matters enormously when many smaller, undated incidents add up to a large total, as in El-Fasher.

What did you do differently and what numbers did you come up with?

Providing an uncertainty estimate – a plausible range rather than a single number of people who may have died in war – reflects how much confidence an estimate deserves, and invites caution.

Still, most sources report only one number.

In a recently published article, we built an uncertainty estimate. We surveyed Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s expert coders to build a model converting any single number into a range of people that have plausibly died in a given war. This range is known as a “probability distribution”.

We applied this model to Sudan in 2025. The results are provided in the figure below. For each number of deaths on the horizontal axis, the height of the curve shows how plausible that number is according to our model. The higher the curve, the more plausible the number.

The peak of the curve from our model indicates that the most likely death toll in Sudan’s war in 2025 is close to 80,000 deaths. As our model is estimated from the Uppsala programme, it is unsurprising that this estimate is close to what they report.

We find that the true number of people killed in 2025 is very likely (with a 90% probability) to fall between 73,000 and 90,000, and there is a small chance that the actual number is as high as 100,000.

This relatively small range indicates that the uncertainty around Sudan’s deaths is much narrower than assumed – even the lower bound number far exceeds many official estimates.

Our estimates, however, should be read with caution. They are informed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s knowledge and only indirectly reflect other estimates. Crucially, our model results cannot be checked against the true number of deaths, which tends to remain unknown as conflict actors have incentives to conceal it.

Despite these caveats, providing a range of people that plausibly have died in war instead of a single figure gives weight to the estimate, and leaves little room to dismiss inconvenient numbers as unreliable.

Why are these data points important?

Understanding how conflict death estimates vary across sources, and why, increases transparency.

Around the attack on El-Fasher, the uncertainty around death reports became a political issue. We argue that it should be a scientific one. One that can be measured.

The evidence suggests that the El-Fasher massacre could have been prevented. Throughout the siege, NGOs and academic institutions repeatedly warned foreign officials of an impending bloodbath.

Pressure against the United Arab Emirates – the Rapid Support Forces’ main supporter – could have curbed the flow of weapons to the group. Yet, western politicians prioritised economic and political ties with Abu Dhabi over preventing atrocity. Officials looked the other way, ignoring or downplaying the reports of rising deaths as uncertain.

Since fighting broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, Sudan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian and displacement crises. More than 34 million people – over half the country’s population – need humanitarian assistance, including food aid. An estimated 14 million people have been displaced.

This suffering could have been foreseen and minimised. Even in the most conservative case, our model finds that more than 70,000 people died in 2025, most of them within a few months. Are 70,000 deaths enough to look the other way?

Conflict monitoring organisations such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program have documented war deaths for decades, drawing on vetted sources and consistent coding rules. Since the uncertainty around their figures can be quantified, as our model shows, this uncertainty is no longer a reason for delay or inaction.

Decision-makers often have the information they need to act early. Used in time, this information can help prevent atrocities and save lives.

– Sudan’s death toll in 2025 could be as high as 100,000: how we did the count
– https://theconversation.com/sudans-death-toll-in-2025-could-be-as-high-as-100-000-how-we-did-the-count-292159

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Murray Leibbrandt, UCT Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Scholar; Director of ARUA’s African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research within SALDRU., University of Cape Town

World leaders have been asked to support a proposed International Panel on Inequality. Brazil, Norway, South Africa and Spain, together with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, made the call on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September 2026.

The panel would be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It would assess the scale of inequality, its drivers and consequences, and the policies that can reduce it. The African Union endorsed the initiative in February, and South Africa intends to present a General Assembly resolution to establish it.

This is a significant step. Inequality could, for the first time, have a permanent scientific body within the multilateral system. But the usefulness of such a panel will depend on whose realities its assessments reflect.

Recent experience shows why this question matters. The Global Justice Report, released in June by the World Inequality Lab, puts forward ambitious proposals. But, as economists working on labour and informality recently argued, many of the proposals are based on how things work in high-income countries. They assume that certain kinds of employment relationships, labour protections and institutions exist.

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Read more: Global justice report offers bold ideas but misses the realities of 2 billion informal workers – economists

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For more than a decade the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research has produced country inequality diagnostics and analyses with African researchers and national statistical offices. Our work is summarised in our recent book on inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.

We think global initiatives are a great step forward. The problem is that frameworks built mainly on the data and institutions of the global north might not be accurate where inequality is most severe.

To address this problem, we have been closely involved in the development of the African Inequality Review. Its aim is to close the knowledge gap about inequality. It will start new cross-country research on African inequality and build a public resource linking the continent’s inequality datasets.

The review can offer three things:

• African-led assessments of inequality, grounded in the continent’s institutions and labour markets

• linked data infrastructure needed to study rents, assets and fiscal choices alongside household outcomes

• a model of research designed with policymakers rather than delivered to them.

Africa will shape the future of global inequality

According to UN projections, sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of world population growth through to the end of this century. Almost all the global growth of the economically active population will come from Africa.

Most Africans are concentrated at the bottom of the global income distribution, so this demographic shift pulls the world’s distribution with it. Between 1990 and 2016, the share of the world’s poorest income decile living in sub-Saharan Africa rose from about one in five to one in three, according to African Development Bank and World Bank estimates.

Inequality within African countries is also among the highest in the world. The continent has seven of the world’s ten most unequal countries. In 2019, the richest 10% of Africans received about 54% of total income, and the poorest half received 9%.

The prospects of Africa’s young and growing population will therefore determine where global inequality goes. An international panel without a strong African evidence base would be assessing the past of global inequality rather than its future.

That evidence base remains thin. The picture of African inequality is based on fewer country observations than other regions. And different databases present markedly different pictures of the levels and changes in inequality on the continent.

Inputs on inequality

The African Inequality Review is modelled on two previous reviews:

• the Deaton Review in the UK, a multi-year, multidisciplinary assessment of inequalities in income, wealth, health and opportunity led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies chaired by Nobel laureate Angus Deaton

• the Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review, a scholarly effort to explain why inequality in the region is still so high and what can be done about it.

The launch was held immediately after a meeting of the African Union and South Africa African Expert Panel. Having the panel involved ensured that senior African policymakers took part along with African and international practitioners and researchers. Participants were asked two questions.

• Where are important policy choices being made without the evidence decision-makers need?

• Which inequality questions, answered well, would change policy?

Several priorities emerged.

The first was that many of the most pressing evidence gaps lie where fiscal, corporate and asset data meet. Participants pointed to tax breaks that governments grant to individual large firms case by case, through negotiated agreements rather than through rules in tax law that apply to every firm. These incentives are rarely tied to results that can be checked, such as jobs created, purchases from local suppliers, or skills and technology passed on to local workers.

They also pointed to difficulties in assessing full economic and social returns to investments in public infrastructure. Impact studies routinely examine who is displaced by a new road and who gains market access. They far less often examine the impacts across the procurement chain and throughout time. In other words who wins contracts and subcontracts and who ultimately captures the rents.

Control over land, mineral resources and credit, and access to legal identity through civil registration, were raised in the same vein.

These patterns of control shape who gains access to opportunity and where productivity stays blocked. Assessments that ask whether a policy or an investment loosens those constraints, rather than only who gains and loses at the point of delivery, give a better account of its longer-term returns.

The second priority was that these questions build on household survey research rather than replace it. Decades of survey and panel data tell us who is poor, how people move in and out of poverty, and how disadvantage passes between generations. The frontier now is to link these microdata with tax records, administrative and firm-level data, and ownership and procurement registers. That would connect the distribution of outcomes to the mechanisms that produce them.

The third concerned the limits of single summary measures. A Gini coefficient, the single number ranging from 0 and 1 as inequality rises, summarises how unequally income is shared across a population. But it cannot tell a government whether its priority should be competition policy and progressive taxation, social protection, or early childhood investment.

Nor is there a known threshold where inequality becomes too high to sustain growth. This depends on what’s causing inequality in that context. For example, in many African contexts even low aggregate inequality masks strong gender biases.

The fourth was that policy design must start from the reality of informal livelihoods, rather than assume they can simply be regulated into formality.

Finally, participants stressed that researchers and policymakers need to work together from the outset if research is to inform decisions.

– The global panel on inequality needs African evidence: here’s how it could work
– https://theconversation.com/the-global-panel-on-inequality-needs-african-evidence-heres-how-it-could-work-292927