PROMOTING DEVELOPMENT IN AREAS OF ACTUAL OR POTENTIAL VIOLENT CONFLICT: APPROACHES IN CONFLICT IMPACT ASSESSMENT AND EARLY WARNING 1 Promoting Development in Areas of Actual or Potential Violent Conflict: Approaches in Conflict Impact Assessment and Early

Most violent conflicts nowadays are taking place in developing countries. The costs of these wars are immense and can throw back a country’s development efforts by years or even decades. Among them are human costs, peacekeeping and humanitarian costs, commercial and reconstruction costs, and political costs. As far as numbers can express human suffering, we may recall that during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an estimated 800,000 persons were killed and more than 2 million forced to flee their homes. Between 1990 and 1995, Rwandan exports dropped by 60 % due to internal instability (Killick/Higdom 1998). During the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 145,000 were killed, 174,000 injured, and 2,5 million people made refugees. The Bosnian GDP plunged from an estimated $ 10 billion to $ 2 billion between 1990 and 1996, while the costs of reconstructing Bosnia have been estimated at several billion dollars (ibid.). The rising number of conflict-related humanitarian emergencies also diverts scarce resources from long-term development to humanitarian assistance. While in the 1980s emergency relief accounted for only 3 % of the total development co-operation budget of the OECD countries, this proportion has risen to 10 % in the 1990s. At the same time, the total amount of international assistance has fallen sharply