'Broadening' business, 'widening' peace: a new research agenda on business and peace building

The new 'Business For Peace' (B4P) paradigm urges multinational corporations (MNCs) to enter conflict zones and fragile post-conflict environments as an alternative to traditional development aid. While B4P's positive impact through economic opening and Corporate Social Responsibility is assumed, corporate presence can instead exacerbate conflict dynamics in certain settings. As B4P is becoming a standardized component throughout all multilateral development aid activities per the United Nations Global Compact B4P platform and the UN's 'Delivering As One' mandate, we argue that bringing B4P into the forefront of research on business, development, and conflict is essential. In this article, we unpack the relationships between business, conflict and liberal peace politics that led to the B4P framework. We then show how five major debates influence B4P today: if MNCs should be peacebuilders; if so, what should they do; how do we define and model ‘peace’ activities; how businesses navigate conflict economies; and how businesses engage with informal economies. We then show how these discussions guide the international community’s multi-billion dollar development agenda and influence how businesses see their new role as peacebuilders and peacemakers. We conclude with suggestions for forward research on this rapidly emerging topic.

The conjunction of business and peace is a growing global phenomenon, but conducted and researched over a vast array of fields and contextual settings. This article provides theoretical order for this disparate material, illustrating cutting-edge research and highlighting the most urgent knowledge gaps to fill. Extracting findings from the business community, international organizations, and the academic community, this article maps these findings into five assertions about how businesses impact upon peace: economic engagement facilitates a peace dividend; encouraging local development facilitates local capacities for peace; importing international norms improves democratic accountability; firms can constrain the drivers or root causes of conflict; and undertaking direct diplomatic efforts with conflict actors builds and/or makes peace. These assertions provide a framework for categorizing and testing prominent business-peace arguments. They also support preliminary arguments that businesses cannot expect to be rewarded as peacebuilders just because they undertake peacebuilding activities, that economic opening only brings as much peace as a local regime will allow, and that truly courageous business-peace choices are rarely made in fragile contexts. This framework can encourage more coherent scholarly findings and more effective business engagements within the complex and challenging realm of peacebuilding. (forthcoming in Business, Peace and Sustainable Development, 2017)

BUSINESS, PEACEBUILDING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, 2019

This analysis establishes a pressing need for researchers and practitioners to shift some share of mind from the ‘what’ – the menu of possible business interventions for peace that dominates the business and peace literature – to the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of business and peace. Advocates will accelerate progress by drawing from contemporary peacebuilding theory and practice to situate private sector actors within a complex conflict system, understand key dynamics reinforcing conflict and undermining attempts towards peace, and seeking entry points for positive influence. Peace advocates will also move more dependably towards their goals as they survey the full range of negative as well as positive impacts of private sector actors in conflict environments, acknowledging and addressing tensions between business roles and relationships in different parts and at different levels of the system. The analysis also suggests the need to move beyond the stereotyping of private sector actors – largely as a homogenous force for bad or good, depending on the commentator’s perspective – to a more nuanced understanding of the perspectives, interests, motives, capabilities, limitations and possibilities for action of particular business actors.

Businesspeople and enterprises may be influential stakeholders with important resources, incentives and ideas in efforts to secure and consolidate peace. They are not necessarily less legitimate or more political actors than the civil society groups with whom donors and others routinely interact. If so, there is an argument that external authorities and agencies with a peacebuilding mandate should, with relevant host authorities, consider cooperative strategies with responsible business actors in pursuit of that mandate. The post-2015 development agenda illustrates greater donor and institutional focus in engaging the private sector. Yet this engagement has not typically been theorised, couched in notions of power and legitimacy and agency, or given a principled underpinning. What is at stake in closer, more cooperative development and conflict-management relationships with business in fragile settings? Does the ambivalence some peacebuilders might have towards engaging with business indicate problems of 'appropriateness'? Is it really so obvious that the for-profit motive should affect the legitimacy of business as a peace stakeholder? Can one justify closer relations or would peacebuilders simply risk undue influence, 'picking winners', or other undesirable outcomes?

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2018

The conjunction of business and peace is a growing global phenomenon, but conducted and researched over a vast array of fields and contextual settings. This article provides theoretical order for this disparate material, illustrating cutting-edge research and highlighting the most urgent knowledge gaps to fill. Extracting findings from the business community, international organizations and the academic community, this article maps these findings into five assertions about how businesses impact upon peace: economic engagement facilitates a peace dividend; encouraging local development facilitates local capacities for peace; importing international norms improves democratic accountability; firms can constrain the drivers or root causes of conflict; and undertaking direct diplomatic efforts with conflict actors builds and/or makes peace. These assertions provide a framework for categorizing and testing prominent business–peace arguments. They also support preliminary arguments that businesses cannot expect to be rewarded as peacebuilders just because they undertake peacebuilding activities, that economic opening only brings as much peace as a local regime will allow, and that truly courageous business–peace choices are rarely made in fragile contexts. This framework can encourage more coherent scholarly findings and more effective business engagements within the complex and challenging realm of peacebuilding.

​What are the conditions under which businesses can move beyond ‘doing no harm’ in the fragile and conflict-affected societies where they work to deliver more tangible positive peace dividends? Designed for businesses, practitioners, scholars and others who are interested and engaged in corporate impact in such areas, this report provides an overview of the main lessons from a four-year study of corporate peacebuilding initiatives across a range of contexts. Its main findings are formulated as seven key questions which can help evaluate risks and improve impact.

Our goals in this article are to summarize the existing literature on the role business can play in creating sustainable peace and to discuss important avenues for extending this research. As part of our discussion, we review the ethical arguments and related research made to date, including the rationale and motivation for businesses to engage in conflict resolution and peace building, and discuss how scholars are extending research in this area. We also focus on specific ways companies can actively engage in conflict reduction including promoting economic development , the rule of law, and principles of external valuation, contributing to a sense of community, and engaging in track-two diplomacy and conflict sensitive practices. We conclude by developing a set of future research questions and considerations.

This paper considers aspects of the relationship between policies promoting private sector investment and growth, and policies consolidating peace. It covers post-conflict transitions where external authorities play a major role. A core contemporary peacebuilding policy assumption is that stimulating economic recovery is vital to sustaining political settlements and social cohesion. Yet how do we respond when policies to stimulate investment and imperatives to consolidate peace lead to contradictory choices? The paper considers framing investment-promotion activities as quasi-regulatory in nature, given that external actors are shaping and influencing private sector impacts on peacebuilding. It reflects on ideas of ‘transitionalism’ as a distinctive policy mindset during exceptional recovery periods. It addresses three questions: (1) what is distinctive about transitional approaches to influencing the ways that business actors may impact peacebuilding (compared with ‘routine’ developmental settings)? (2) What is distinctive about promoting conflict-sensitive business activity and investment, and how might this require different priorities? (3) What is the proper balance in transitional policymaking between attracting investment to capital-starved settings, and requiring investment to be responsible?