Outside its Sciences & Médecine section that I most often read, Le Monde published last weekend a tribune by the anthropologist Michel Naepels [who kindly replied to my email on his column] on the impossibility to evaluate the number of deaths in Congo due to the political instability (a weak and undemocratic state fighting armed rebel groups), for lack of a reliable sample. With a huge gap between two estimations of this number, from 200,000 to 5.4 million excess deaths. In the later, IRC states that “only 0.4 percent of all deaths across DR Congo were attributed directly to violence”. Still, diverging estimates do not mean numbers are impossible to produce, just that more elaborate methods like those developed by Rebecca Steorts for Syrian deaths must be investigated. Which requires more means than those available to the local States (assuming they are interested in the answer) or to NGOs. This also raises the question whether or not “excess deaths” has an absolute meaning, since it refers to an hypothetical state of the world that has not taken place.
On the same page, another article written by geographers shed doubt on predictive policing software, not used in France, if not so clearly as in the Significance article by Kristian Lum and William Isaac last year.
Xi'an's Og 