Michael Spagat is a Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He gained his Ph.D. at Harvard University and earlier held faculty posts at Brown University and the University of Illinois. Spagat’s published papers on armed conflict have been published in Nature, Scientific Reports, the New England Journal of Medicine, theJournal of Peace Research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and PLoS Medicine among other places. His current research addresses universal patterns in modern war, fabrication in survey research, the Dirty War Index civilian casualties in the Iraq conflict and problems in the measurement of war deaths. He blogs on war at https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/.