Introduction and Overview

Definition of the Challenge

Large-scale violent conflict takes several forms. However, over time international conflict has tended to become less common, whereas civil war has tended to become more common. The two phenomena are radically different and cannot sensibly be analysed within the same study. Here we focus exclusively upon the challenge of reducing the global incidence of civil war. Much of what we will do is previewed in our book Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Collier et al. 2003). We should add that the main models we use to calculate the costs and benefits are our own. It would clearly strengthen the robustness of the analysis were a range of models to be used, but unfortunately the quantitative analysis of civil war risk is still at an early stage and so there is not yet a substantial literature.

Benefits

The benefits of a reduction in the global incidence of civil war are common to all successful deployments of instruments for conflict reduction. The next section attempts to establish credible lower-bound estimates of these benefits. They accrue at three levels: national, regional and global. The benefits at the national level are partly economic and partly social. The economic benefits of avoiding war in a country can be estimated from the effect of civil war on growth. The social benefits are more difficult, but some estimate in terms of Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) has been attempted.