Ebook: Estimating Impact: A Handbook of Computational Methods and Models for Anticipating Economic, Social, Political and Security Effects in International Interventions

International interventions are among the most controversial and complex of human endeavors. In today's smaller, flatter, and interdependent world, interventions of all sorts - economic sanctions or aid, natural-disaster relief, various diplomatic or civil-military engagements—are likely to persist and to become yet more complex and difficult. The last decade has seen an explosive growth of research on methods and tools, particularly computational tools, for estimating effects of interventions. In ESTIMATING IMPACT Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, offer readers a broad and practical introduction to computational approaches for anticipating effects of interventions. International interventions and estimating effects of such interventions on human, economic, social, and political variables are of critical importance to business analysts and planners as well as to government policy planners and non-governmental humanitarian organizations. In current practice, intervention-related decisions, planning, and effects estimating rely on historical analogies, on qualitative theories, on expert opinions, experience, and intuition. ESTIMATING IMPACT argues for a broader, more balanced view. It describes how emerging computational techniques can help analysts, planners, and decision-makers in a number of ways: estimating the range of likely future conditions, highlighting unwarranted assumptions, generating alternative approaches, elucidating details and uncovering the potential for unanticipated effects. While the field is still very young, the trend is unmistakable: there is a rising recognition that quantitative, computational methods are indispensable elements—although by no means panaceas —for making prudent decisions regarding international interventions.

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Virtually all human endeavors can be analyzed and modeled and understood through computer-aided study, and that is very much at the core of operations research, game theory, and decision science. Understanding the potential impact of any action is critical to the success of that action, and in ESTIMATING IMPACT Alexander Kott and Gary Citrenbaum, with a stellar group of contributors, demonstrate how military or humanitarian interventions (or the decision not to intervene) can be rigorously analyzed beforehand and their likely impacts and ramifications predicted at levels appropriate to their scope. A wide range of modeling programs are available that support plan assessment and impact forecast, and they allow accurate prediction within an interdependent set of political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure systems, and experts involved in the use and development of these tools demonstrate how, when, and why they should be used.