Catherine Lutz
Catherine Lutz is an anthropologist and co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War project. Her work examines militarisation, war, empire, and the hidden human costs of official policy. Her analysis of casualty reporting is useful for thinking about how institutions turn harm into administrative data: what gets counted becomes governable, while what is omitted can disappear from accountability.
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Counting the wounded: how complaint systems and data bureaucracies erase harm
The same patterns of attrition described in The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition also define how governments manage harm in military and veterans’ systems. Delays in compensation, endless investigations, and deferrals justified as ‘process’ reveal that administrative time itself functions as an instrument of harm. What appears as prudence operates as quiet abandonment—an institutional strategy that…