A while a go I posted an informal review of the dirty war index (DWI) and its tightly related problem of biased databases, which was in response to Hicks and Spagat’s paper about the DWI [1] in PLoS Medicine. In the meantime, I have written that in an article-style format and have structured the arguments into one narrative; this just got published [2] in the Fall issue of the Peace & Conflict Review journal.
Like PLoS, PCR is an open access journal, so the short article is freely available online in html and pdf format that is coordinated and provided by the UN-mandated University for Peace. When you download the pdf, you get the rest of the Fall issue with it, which has a special feature with an analysis of Obama’s Prague speech on moral responsibility of the United States, an assessment of development models in conflict settings, and much more.
References
[1] Hicks MH-R, Spagat M (2008) The Dirty War Index: A public health and human rights tool for examining and monitoring armed conflict outcomes. PLoS Med 5(12): e243. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050243.
[2] Keet, C.M. (2009). Dirty wars, databases, and indices. Peace & Conflict Review, 4(1):75-78.
Keet blog 
Pingback: Questionable search terms for my blog « Keet blog