  We consider a scalar charge travelling in a curved background spacetime. We
calculate the quasi-local contribution to the scalar self-force experienced by
such a particle following a geodesic in a general spacetime. We also show that
if we assume a massless field and a vacuum background spacetime, the expression
for the self-force simplifies significantly. We consider some specific cases
whose gravitational analog are of immediate physical interest for the
calculation of radiation reaction corrected orbits of binary black hole
systems. These systems are expected to be detectable by the LISA space based
gravitational wave observatory. We also investigate how alternate techniques
may be employed in some specific cases and use these as a check on our own
results.
