"They are 21st-century guerrillas, shooting off more press bulletins than bullets," said Eduardo Pizarro, a Colombian sociologist and conflict expert.
Sands Pierce, a professional conflict expert from EndTime, Inc. says "It's not that hard, I just keep saying "no" to the most common sense things and 'no' again when all my demands are met".
Hunter: There is quite a lot of work around in development agencies for peace and conflict experts.
The former New Zealand prime minister was in Britain to give a lecture to conflict experts at Oxford University, where she warned that Mali's road back from a combination of violent conflict and constitutional crisis was not an easy one.
Mr Etomi, alluding to the report commissioned by Shell, said research by conflict experts had highlighted how the company "sometimes feeds conflict by the way we award contracts, gain access to land, and deal with community representatives; how ill-equipped our security team is to reduce conflict; and how drastically conflict reduces the effect of our community development programme".
While exact figures aren't available due to the conflict, experts say maternal and infant deaths are on the rise.
Beyond terrorism, the latest developments in Yemen have worrisome implications for a Middle East already wracked by Sunni-Shia conflict, experts say.
Some war mongers are being more proactive, investing heavily in conflict experts who are brought in as negotiators and can take any decent peace-time agreement and find problems with it.
As with any potential military conflict, experts have long said the key to avoiding accidental escalation is the creation of "confidence building measures" between all sides such as meetings, hotlines and shared discussions over threats.
Our multidisciplinary editorial team includes physicians, nurses, public health specialists, social scientists, lawyers, psychologists, anthropologists, social workers and conflict experts from the northern and southern hemispheres.
When values came into conflict, experts prioritised them differently: for example, when experts perceived a conflict between delivering benefits and promoting autonomy, there were differences in which value was prioritised.
