Book project: Numbers of War

My book project Numbers of War: Conflict Prevention and the Mathematization of Violence examines how ‘war’ became an issue that is deemed to require a global effort to be resolved by focusing on its abstraction and quantification. Looking at early and contemporary efforts of representing war as a scientific problem that can addressed with quantitative evidence, I trace how war was constructed as a global problem in interlocking processes of defining war as cataclysmic, making it an international phenomenon through abstraction and latching it onto existing issues such as Christian ethics, civilisational ideals and cost-benefit rationality. My research expands our understanding of how governance objects are constructed through formalization. In this way, it helps us understand better the continuous push to resolve socio-political problems through scientific and technological means.