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Deaths in wars by region

What you should know about this indicator

  • A war is defined by Project Mars as a conflict between states with differentiated militaries and clear frontlines that causes at least 500 deaths over its duration.
  • If a war lasted more than one year, we distributed its deaths evenly across years.
  • Project Mars identifies war deaths based on contemporary sources and academic research.
  • Project Mars considers the 1982-1984 war in Lebanon and the Afghan War from 1996-2001 to have had elements of both an interstate and a civil war. We have treated them overall as interstate wars to make our charts simpler.
  • The conflict-level data by Project Mars cannot be neatly mapped to individual countries, which is why we only present aggregated data for the world and world regions.
Deaths in wars by region
The low estimate of the number of deaths in all ongoing conventional wars that year.
Source
Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 21, 2023
Date range
1800–2011
Unit
deaths

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Jason Lyall – Project Mars

Project Mars. This dataset records new data on 229 unique belligerents in 252 conventional wars fought between 1800 and 2011. Project Mars introduces new data about these belligerents, including their level of prewar military inequality, and new measures of battlefield performance, including desertion, defection, and fratricidal violence. The latest version is Version 1.1. (2022-02-08).

You can find more details on the dataset in its notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20230717140532/https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=5857673&version=2.0

Retrieved on
September 21, 2023
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lyall, Jason. Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Project Mars. This dataset records new data on 229 unique belligerents in 252 conventional wars fought between 1800 and 2011. Project Mars introduces new data about these belligerents, including their level of prewar military inequality, and new measures of battlefield performance, including desertion, defection, and fratricidal violence. The latest version is Version 1.1. (2022-02-08).

You can find more details on the dataset in its notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20230717140532/https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=5857673&version=2.0

Retrieved on
September 21, 2023
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lyall, Jason. Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Deaths in wars by region”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Max Roser (2024) - “War and Peace”. Data adapted from Jason Lyall. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260416-150432/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-region-project-mars.html [online resource] (archived on April 16, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Jason Lyall, Project Mars (2020) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Deaths in wars by region” [dataset]. Jason Lyall, “Project Mars” [original data]. Retrieved April 16, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260416-150432/grapher/deaths-in-wars-by-region-project-mars.html (archived on April 16, 2026).

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