Cost of Conflict - Limitations

Limitations

Researchers and analysts engaged in using this tool acknowledge that it is highly ambitious to identify the price of war, and there are limitations to assessing the total cost of any conflict. Conflict is not the only cause of impoverishment, diseases and other ills suffered by mankind; as Paul Collier deduces in his study of Africa, economics proved to be a major cause of conflict. What the cost of conflict tool serves to demonstrate is the impact of conflict above these and other natural factors, and how it has sometimes exacerbated them.

In some cases it is difficult to find contemporary data, or attribute costs to a specific period when, for example in the case of Kashmir, where fighting has been going on at different levels of intensity for a long time. In such cases it could prove useful to have a significant year or episode in history as a benchmark for calculations. For example the 'Cost of Conflict in the Middle East' report by Strategic Foresight Group, uses 1991 as a basis and explains how they believe that the Madrid Conference provided a historic opportunity for peace. The study by David Shave on the Peru Conflict uses 1980, or the first year of Sendero activity, as the starting point.

Read more about this topic:  Cost Of Conflict

Famous quotes containing the word limitations:

    The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    Much of what contrives to create critical moments in parenting stems from a fundamental misunderstanding as to what the child is capable of at any given age. If a parent misjudges a child’s limitations as well as his own abilities, the potential exists for unreasonable expectations, frustration, disappointment and an unrealistic belief that what the child really needs is to be punished.
    Lawrence Balter (20th century)

    No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)