The demography of armed conflict and violence: assessing the extent of population loss associated with the 1998–2004 D.R. Congo armed conflict

In an effort to document and monitor the scale and scope of recent conflicts (1998–2004) in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), in conjunction with some of the world’s leading epidemiologists, conducted a series of five surveys in the country over a seven years’ period (2000–2007). Estimates of conflict-related mortality generated from the IRC’s surveys range from 3.3 million between years 1998 and 2002, to 5.4 million excess deaths for the period between 1998 and 2007. Reflecting on the IRC’s work, the current study combines four different data sources – 1984 DRC Population Census, 1995 and 2001 DRC Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and the 2007 DRC Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) – to derive demographic estimates and assess the extent of population loss associated with the conflict period between 1995 and 2007. Both statistical and demographic techniques are relied upon for this purpose. Findings from this study do not warrant estimates produced by the IRC. The IRC approach may have overestimated the scale of excess deaths associated with the 1998 – 2007 armed conflict period. Because the approach used in the current study is mainly based on selected assumptions, a level of uncertainty is expected to be associated with the derived estimates. For this reason, sensitivity analyses have been conducted to define a range of plausible estimates representing the excess population loss