Conflict, Security & Development ISSN: 1467-8802 (Print) 1478-1174 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsd20 Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’: a new research agenda on business and peace-building Jason Miklian & Peer Schouten To cite this article: Jason Miklian & Peer Schouten (2019) Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’: a new research agenda on business and peace-building, Conflict, Security & Development, 19:1, 1-13, DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2019.1561612 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2019.1561612 Published online: 14 Feb 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccsd20 CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 2019, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2019.1561612 INTRODUCTION Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’: a new research agenda on business and peace-building Jason Miklian a and Peer Schouten b a Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Oslo, Norway and Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; bDanish Institute for International Studies (Peace, Risk and Violence Unit), Copenhagen, Denmark and International Peace Information Service, Antwerp, Belgium ABSTRACT KEYWORDS What role does business play in peace-building and conflict reduction? This special issue tackles this complex question, exploring varied business efforts to bring peace through six rigorous qualitative cases in Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somaliland, Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador. Three main findings cut across this issue. First, local context is paramount to success; there is no one universal formula that a regulator, business or peace practitioner aiming to advance a business agenda for peace can employ for operational success. Second, rather than compartmentalising ‘peace’ into projects that often carry ‘win-lose’ consequences for local communities, business-peace projects must first understand who they are empowering so that they do not unwittingly make the conflict worse. Third, investment and access are deeply intertwined in fragile and conflict-affected areas, and business-peace projects that simply try to improve business access typically exacerbate inequalities favouring elite actors. We close with a discussion on how to take the business and peace-building agenda forward with scholarship and policy, stressing that business-peace projects must be assessed at the societal and not project level if their impact is to be truly beneficial for a political economy of peaceful development. Business and peace; sustainable development; peace-building; Myanmar; Democratic Republic of Congo; South Sudan; Somaliland; Brazil; Guatemala; El Salvador; global governance Introduction ‘The only corporate responsibility’, the economist Milton Friedman wrote in 1970, ‘is to make a profit’. Half a century later, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Friedman’s views on social impact by firms have been dismissed by the business community, and much of the world now sees corporations as having a duty to build a larger social role. This strand of thinking reached its apex in 2013, when the United Nations Global Compact published Business for Peace (B4P),1 launching a concurrent platform to bring together global business leaders around the banner of eradicating war. The notion is stunning: the very organisation enshrining the state system and its monopoly of force now advocates a larger private sector role in peace-building itself.2 But the B4P initiative, from which this special issue title derives, does not stand alone. With overstretched peace-building budgets and development agencies seeking CONTACT Jason Miklian © 2019 King’s College London jason@prio.org 2 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN new partners, the private sector has emerged as a peace-building player, with the resources, local knowledge and motivation to make a major difference. Governments, organisations like the United Nations and the World Bank, and international nongovernmental organisations across the world are encouraging businesses to stimulate peaceful development through the poverty reduction and socio-economic gains that economic growth is presumed to provide, and even supporting firms as nation builders amid the belief that corporate help is not only advantageous but necessary to build peace. Going further, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to create a more peaceful world and reconstruct the bottom of global society by eliminating the world’s worst injustices – the most ambitious multilateral undertaking ever attempted. The UN considers the private sector to be an essential partner in this agenda, and Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has said ‘we are counting on the private sector to drive success. We call upon all businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to solving (SDG) challenges’.3 Today, over €7 trillion in investments has been benchmarked to corporate progress on peace and development through the SDGs and Goal 16: ‘Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions’, with over 20,000 companies across the globe now signatories to its initiatives.4 Not surprisingly, this new development is rapidly finding traction in academic literature. Business and peace-building: an emerging field Business and peace-building scholars explore the assertion that businesses have a role to play in maintaining and promoting peace and societal development in conflictaffected parts of the world. Promising new work has begun to address valuable pieces of this puzzle. Theoretical literature has crafted theories of change and mapped private sector roles in peace and development,5 and on why firms work in the pursuit of ‘liberal peace-building’.6 Quantitative studies explore the breadth of firms operating in conflict;7 and the economic conditions that may facilitate peace.8 Case literature includes how firms and business associations have attempted to create peace dividends.9 Studies on particular sectors, such as private security, have uncovered vast changes sweeping through the way multinational corporations’ (MNCs) operational presence relates to peace and conflict dynamics.10 They highlight how MNCs rarely operate ‘alone’ but rather through networks of power which are increasingly shaped as public–private partnerships (PPPs), blurring lines of accountability. These and other state-of-the-art studies11 allow us to say that business initiatives intended to influence peace do in fact have an impact, and that these impacts can be significant. For example, national firms are more likely to be successful than multinational firms in local peace and development initiatives,12 the role of the CEO is essential in business-peace success,13 firms can enjoy reputational rewards for peacebuilding action in fragile local communities that can be just as valuable as traditional mitigation of reputational risk measures,14 and that business-development partnerships show significant promise in specific circumstances.15 Thus, a new field of study is consolidating around the peace roles of business – with real strides being made to understand opportunities and limitations. Despite this expansion (or perhaps because CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 3 of it), we risk reducing the linkages between business and peace-building to a very narrow set of actors and ways of acting. Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’ This special issue provides a more nuanced assessment of business contributions to peace in environments where such contributions are most needed. It does so by taking as its premise two gaps in the literature. First, to deepen our understanding of businesspeace interactions in fragile- and conflict-affected countries, it is necessary to broaden the scope beyond large MNCs. Some academic research has tended to focus on firms as ‘bad actors’ in conflict and crisis settings, leading some to denounce B4P as a mere discursive veil for corporate misconduct by MNCs in conflict zones.16 This assessment is often informed by the collective research bias towards a narrow set of extractive industries who actually transgress norms, often in dramatic ways. Yet to thereby dismiss the aspirational hypothesis that business might and ought to contribute to peace is too easy. Indeed, there is little sense in looking for MNC peace contributions where there are none intended. To remedy the narrow focus of both advocates and detractors on MNC peace contributions, this special issue casts a wider net to also capture the real (or at least proclaimed) peace roles of national businesses, of subnational market places, and of local business networks. The ‘private sector’ is significantly more expansive than Western extractive MNCs alone, including Global North and South firms, national and transnational enterprises, varied sectors, and different types of public/private structures and associations. To denote this broader empirical field, we prefer to speak of a ‘business-peace nexus’ that materialises through varying constellations of business and conflict actors cross-cutting global/local, civil/military and formal/informal scales.17 This opening of the analytical aperture allows for a series of case studies introducing the reader to the variegated peace contributions across the whole spectrum from formal MNCs to informal trading posts. Second, we unpack the concept of ‘peace’ itself. Rather than trying to compartmentalise peace in terms of indicators that are measurable across contexts, we collectively subscribe to a more anthropological notion of peace. Aware that who gets to decide on what is considered a peace contribution is a political stake, we argue that those who are supposed to be peace’s ultimate beneficiaries – local communities – should have a bigger voice in business-peace initiatives. Global B4P initiatives have a tendency to be self-referential, with participation in fora and prizes handed out based on loose criteria contrived with the purpose to bring more business leaders into the fold.18 A real engagement with B4P, we hold, entails reaching beyond conference galas and shiny brochures, listening instead to those who are supposed to reap peace dividends from business. Yet little research to date exists which asks how conflict-affected communities perceive the impact of business initiatives with an explicit peace objective. A commitment to such a point of departure, however, has complex methodological implications. For one, doing fieldwork in conflict-affected communities is not a straightforward affair – and evoking the very notion of ‘peace’ can be a laden one. Second, the notion of the ‘local’ as a static category in peace-building initiatives has long been unpacked and found wanting.19 Once we accept that there is no essential and 4 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN uniform ‘local community’ separate from entanglements to the outside (outside peacebuilding lingo and some related academic strands), the choice on who is given a voice, and who is not, in assessing peace contributions takes on a crucial one. Overview of the special issue Adopting those two premises has binding implications upon both research design and methodology. A key aim of this issue is thus to bring forward new empirical work. All six contributions break new ground in their own right, and are by necessity exploratory in nature. This entails that all contributions are qualitative case studies, a strong methodological fit to understanding business–society interactions and the motivations behind decision-making in such, and a balanced and agency-positive method to engage individuals in vulnerable communities.20 Its value lies in achieving understanding by using generative questions to pursue potentially unexpected responses to get a better grasp of what local communities find most valuable in their own words, especially in conflict prone environments where special ethnographic, methodological and ethical sensitivities may be required. Rather than purporting to offer sweeping generalisations on the ‘nature’ of business and peace, each article offers a rich contextual texture that can serve as a baseline to engage with outcome-driven policy formulation and comparative scholarship. All six articles employ qualitative methodologies that incorporate assessments and contextualisation of empirical material. While specific methodologies range from anthropological and ethnographic to surveys and literature analysis, all are designed to broaden the scope of methodological inquiry into the complex interactions between business, peace and development. It also offers readers and scholars new pathways to engage with and test the emerging core questions of the field, in order to further improve our understandings of local perspectives on business and peace. This issue presents six business-peace case studies from four countries in Latin America (Colombia, Guatemala/El Salvador and Brazil), and three countries in Africa (South Sudan, Somaliland and the Democratic Republic of Congo), covering a wide swath of daunting conflicts and a panoply of peace-building and development efforts. Our guest authors all have significant experience in their countries of study, have extensively published on such, and bring deep contextual knowledge of their respective cases and countries. We note that while we refer to each of these cases by their country name shorthand in the following pages, most of these articles explore at the subnational level of analysis and are not ‘country cases’ per se. First, Somaliland21 surfaces as an outlier case in most peace and development narratives, and for good reasons, for it is probably the only recent case of home-brewed peace and state building. Here, the business-peace nexus manifests as an acceptable regional equilibrium that clan elites were able to manufacture out of business interests and disputes around a shared interest in growth and peace.22 But Somaliland is also a case of a much older and more widespread phenomenon, namely, of state formation emerging around a crucial logistical infrastructure to interface with the outside world as the main bone of contention and stabilisation.23 Indeed, Frederick Cooper has argued it is characteristic of colonial states to take shape of ‘gatekeeper states’, typically controlling a port through which patterns of extraversion were engineered and controlled.24 CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 5 This holds true for Somaliland, where most economic activities are pastoralist and nomadic in nature, making them difficult to govern from a statist perspective. In such a context, controlling taxation at a static obligatory passage point such as the Berbera port is about as ambitious as one can get. Yet while domestic elites in Somaliland have managed to craft a fragile modus vivendi out of control over this bottleneck, as Musa and Horst write in this issue, foreign firm entry into the port economy under the guise of legitimating the state in the global community may be a trojan horse, bringing instead dangerous disruption of a long-negotiated and fragile peace. In the Myanmar case,25 ‘peace’ takes a more formal shape, as in the green light for MNCs to enter the country and start doing business, irresponsive, as Miklian writes, to local conflict. Here, outside capital fortifies the hold of the elites, amplifying disparities which gave rise to the conflict in the first place. But his careful case study also shows that the header ‘MNC’ hides more than it reveals. On its face, the business-peace nexus takes the more conventional shape of MNCs operating in a conflict context. But rather than full-fledged expatriate machinations, MNCs in Myanmar are instead curtailed by the military elite in terms of operational presence. Instead, the military junta mandates themselves as Joint Ventureship partners and in the process dictates local operational strategy.26 The Myanmar case shows how radically perceptions of peace impact differ across Myanmar’s societal fault lines. While the division of spoils of MNC partnerships clearly skewed towards government and military elites, no-one is surreptitiously positive about its impact. For Burmese elites, too, are conscious of the disruptive effects of MNC expansion in the country, and prefer shaming their source of foreign currency for its bias towards a Muslim Rohingya minority. Thus, should MNCs be held responsible for the human rights abuses committed to advance their growth figures, or can they continue to act as if their nose is bleeding as their operational autonomy is so restricted? In the Democratic Republic of Congo,27 outside efforts to engineer peace through the private sector take a very different shape. The few multinationals in the country are very quiet about ‘peace’ in a context where that term as well as the regime in place are highly contested. For this special issue, Marijnen and Schouten focus on a PPP that aims to achieve peace by stimulating the private sector. The Virunga Initiative, as it is called, does so through electrification, to offer support for private sector growth and generate employment which would absorb potential spoilers in conflict-ridden Eastern Congo. Yet, through an in-depth study of how locals perceive and respond to the initiative, the case study demonstrates that the initiative plays out very differently on the ground. Indeed, the Virunga Initiative is more haunted by unintended consequences of choices made along the line than a problem with intentions. While the effort to reduce violent conflict through electrification is laudable and bold, the requirements of for-profit business imperatives end up overshadowing the peace dividends that could have materialised out of a non-profit approach. As the authors situate this kind of technopolitics within the longer history of efforts to engineer development through infrastructure projects in Congo, it becomes evident how consistently problematic its relation to the expression of power and questions of participation has been. In Brazil,28 a longue durée case study of one extractive project illustrates an oftenoverlooked aspect of how perceptions structure peace action by MNC. Physical mines often change hands in a speculative economy, and new owners might come 6 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN to the operation with a fresh gaze, intending to impact positively on local communities. Yet the enactment of a corporation is not solely the property of the legal owners of an enterprise. Indeed, local perceptions are not without history, and the institutional knowledge that a firm gains over time is rarely, if ever, passed along to the new owners along with the deed. Just as with the postcolonial state, experiences of previous corporate engagement inform how those affected interact with extractive projects. After all, it is still the same extractive project diverting resources from their soil. Good intentions by Hydro stand in a classic case of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as window dressing, confirming once more the deeply engrained image of cynicism regarding foreign extractive firms in fragile communities. In 2013, South Sudan collapsed back into conflict after a period filled with optimism and hope. Today, all MNC have left and outside the oil sector, there is little formal business activity to speak of. Thus, the business peace nexus manifests differently along local-global lines: a development community desperate for local linkages label pre-existent border trade mechanisms as ‘peace markets’, without recognising this as a potential whitewashing of practices which can just as well perpetuate conflict. Challenging this simplification, Rolandsen29 investigates market exchanges in the antagonistic borderlands of the two Sudans. The empirical research is centred around the contested area of Abyei where improved relations between the two countries have transformed this area into a corridor for long-distance trade. He concludes that markets in and of themselves do not bias towards war or peace; it is rather their interplay with contextual factors and constituent actors – in this case, skewed towards mistrust and conflict – which shape the role of markets. In doing so, this case cautions us to apply simplistic peace labels to basic economic building blocks typical in some of the most daunting environments, urging us to contextualise any such analysis. Bull and Aguilar-Stoen30 take us back to the national level of analysis, asking why and how business elites collectively supported peace processes over time in Guatemala and El Salvador. Studying two decades of business elite behaviour through waves of conflict and neo-liberal transformation, the authors explore the political and structural environment that led these erstwhile parallel communities to take divergent paths regarding their support for peace deliberation, negotiation, and for the institutions designed to implement peaceful development. Promises of the private sector’s transformational effect upon society – and the expectations saddled upon those chosen to deliver it – loom large. Guatemala’s ‘Modernisers 2.0’ did just that, promoting sustained dialogue with marginalised and indigenous populations. But in El Salvador, a partial closing to political power corridors led to a more pessimistic outlook on the value of supporting peace and community agendas over ‘core’ business issues like regulation and corruption. A key finding is that while the private sector took an ‘institutional turn’ in both countries towards more direct peace support, continuous dialogue between key socio-economic stakeholders made durable peace institutions more likely to succeed. A blend of traditional business strategy in risk-prone environments and a more holistic long-term look at how the private sector can be a positive contributor to society, this ‘institutional turn’ presents itself as a necessary – but not sufficient – condition for sustained peace progress by the private sector. CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 7 Three takeaways: context, benefits, access Once we acknowledge that business engagement in peace is not just a public relations agenda but also a real series of strategies and activities that businesses take to navigate conflict contexts, new dynamics come into view. These dynamics do not necessarily mean exploring a ‘dark side’ of globalisation but rather the more analytical observation that agency across the business-peace nexus is not confined one or another company but rather emerges from the multiple ways in which business initiatives entangle with politicised conflict configurations. Accepting this premise entails the recognition that local context is the window through which all insight follows, as is evident throughout this special issue. This lesson – so well known in the peace-building community that it borders on cliché31 – remains an elusive concept in the business-peace space. Put simply, there is no one universal formula that a regulator, business, or peace practitioner aiming to advance a B4P agenda could employ for operational success across all of our cases. One particular contextual factor comes to the fore. A characteristic of conflict settings is that any kind of cash inflow or ‘business opportunity’ is locally perceived through the pre-extant lens of contested local inequalities. Further, such an influx is nearly always perceived as zero-sum, in terms of winners and losers. Time and again across our cases’ local perceptions of the peace contribution of a business initiative, we see radical splits along lines that see it as a spoil to divide, not a communal good to share or build upon. While these tensions are commonly recognised by conflict studies scholars, including previous Conflict, Security & Development contributors,32 the consistency across cases observed here deals a more concrete blow to the inherent driving ideology subscribed to by many B4P signatories that business deliver a ‘win-win’ logic into conflict situations.33 In Myanmar, Congo, Brazil and Somaliland, the recurrent pattern is more accurately described in terms of local perceptions as carrying a ‘win-lose’ logic. These calculations are often made in relative, not absolute, terms. For example, most ‘win-win’ projects are designed to deliver gains across society, but in practice the distribution of said gains is so severely skewed that it renders the lower portion of such to ‘loser’ communities so inconsequential that it can even be conflict-generating itself. After all, for every conflictaffected community that stands to gain from a given business initiative, there are often several who feel left out. Thus, simply pointing to net positive gains of corporate presence in a conflict-affected society is always a partial reading. This leads to a second finding resonating across all cases, one that speaks back to the premise on who gets to define ‘peace’. While under certain conditions the private sector can collectively generate a peace contribution to a country, such benefits have geographically uneven spillover effects.34 For example, in Congo, an electrification scheme ended up benefiting regional businesspersons who had made their fortunes during civil war, while offering little reward for local communities struggling for survival. It was surmised that the president’s family profited from the business development projects that will most benefit from the initiative. In Myanmar, new regulatory frameworks facilitated economic growth and the entry of MNCs in strategic areas, but all without ameliorating – indeed fortifying–the tight control of army elites as they conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign. Repression in the periphery intensifies to no detriment 8 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN upon Myanmar’s breakneck GDP growth – a growth that was explicitly promised to be peace-generating. This dynamic can be likened to a kind of internal frontier colonisation, elite accumulation works through violent appropriation driven by foreign capital, which frames its entry through the silver lining of peace. Also in Somaliland, business involvement is tightly kept on a leash by elites, who open the gates of economic development only when they can be assured a comparative advantage over erstwhile political challengers. Peace and development effects thus take place in pockets of productivity while leaving the structure of conflict intact in other areas. And in Brazil as elsewhere, what frequently ends up happening is that foreign firms think they contribute to development by ‘sourcing labour locally’ while they anger local communities in their area of operation because labour has been sourced from big cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Third, in many conflict-affected countries, the primary sector makes up the lion’s share of the economy. In these contexts, getting resources to markets is a key form of power, and control over obligatory passage points to access and evacuation of resources is a central bone of contestation (and spoil to win) in conflict. Foreign investments in such contexts are often limited to industrial versions of the primary sector, or to the transport sector, both of which have profound impacts on who gets what. It is, therefore, no surprise that many of the controversies we encountered around the peace contribution of business materialise around logistical nodes–port infrastructures in Somaliland, marketplaces in South Sudan, electricity grids in Congo. And even when this is not the case, elites in power do everything to retain their role as obligatory passage point for business initiatives, most evident in Myanmar where this takes neartotalitarian form. Moving forward: is a more realistic approach to B4P possible? B4P is an aspirational agenda that aims to influence key decision makers in firms to the idea that business has a peace role. While the aspiration stands firm, the emerging evidence here suggests that this kind of ‘commitment’ will leave few positive traces in the conflict-affected areas where it is most needed without foundational changes. We also note that if there would have been a sincere desire to contribute to peace regardless of profit, companies already have dozens of sophisticated guidance documents with clear recommendations, evidence, and best practices to draw upon (‘source locally’; ‘be conflict sensitive’; ‘involve communities in decision-making’). In most of the cases presented here, the most straightforward way for firms willing to invest during ongoing conflict was simply, stay away, as during ongoing conflict, there is no win-win. Moreover – and of greater policy consequence – when initiatives by B4P and development are only assessed at the individual level, they risk missing the larger societal consequences. With business and peace, the parts often are more than the sum. This is shown in the DRC and most strikingly in Myanmar, where the absorptive capacity of a host society for business-peace largesse is so overwhelmed that cumulative effects of business-peace projects that may all be individually laudable and locally positive create a collective negative effect upon the host society.35 As such, when considering those conditions and policies that a ‘political economy of peaceful CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 9 development’ entails, systems analysis approaches of the cumulative impact of the private sector are often sidelined, to the long-term detriment of peace itself. One recent example is the UN and World Bank’s push to bring the private sector into refugee camps around the world as an ‘investment opportunity’, without serious consideration of how such investments may help permanently entrench these groups in the very places where the governments they fled prefer to have them.36 If real policy advancement is to be made on how companies interact with the societies within which they work, binding regulatory initiatives and policy support from wealthy countries will likely play a substantial role. A first way in which firms could be forced to contribute to peace and development in conflict-affected countries is by closing legal loopholes that facilitate mass tax evasion through offshoring, subcontracting and/or transfer pricing, as well as demanding the insertion of clauses that their host governments publish where paid taxes go.37 A second way is by forcing firms operating in conflict-affected societies to be fully transparent to outside scrutiny by publishing all relevant documentation on how they deal with risk, security, and community development.38 Finally, Western governments sincerely interested in a bigger role for the private sector in peace and development could reduce those trade barriers that consistently affect negatively those countries with low GDP because they are forced to stick to primary resource exportation.39 These initiatives are of course unlikely. But if one wants to support ‘what works’, these are the policies needed. To deliver better business-peace scholarship, analysis, and guidance, we also need to better understand how the private sector functions, recognising that it is just as problematic to lump everything under ‘the private sector’ as monolithic/unitary as it would be to do the same regarding what ‘civil society’ does. This can mean additional study of how businesses act (how they make decisions regarding conflict sensitivity, decisions to enter/leave, their strategy to work through or around conflict, and ways to handle within-firm tensions on these issues); what businesses believe (in their mission statements, CSR and social impact activities, and examples of expanded within-firm risk analysis that incorporates all of the above); and how businesses vary, such as in variations across sectors, between headquarters/regional offices, in the types of firms (domestic vs. Global North vs. Global South, public vs. private vs. PPPs) and similar. A by-the-book reading of this issue might lead one to believe that the B4P experiment is doomed to failure, littered with cautionary tales of the private sector’s misadventures in peace. Indeed, increased geopolitical competition and a loosening of regulatory hold over corporate conduct – as typified the withdrawal of the Dodd– Frank Act in the United States – provide little ground for optimism. The interest in peace engagement by the private sector in fragile regions is often more genuine and more powerful than critical scholars give it credit for, but the conditions and context for such engagements need to be much more narrowly defined and assessed.40 Altruistic aims alone are not enough to ensure that the B4P project can deliver peace at any level, and several cases show that ‘doing good for peace and development’ by business can spiral into local conflict equations ultimately worse than if nothing was done at all. Yet, this special issue offers some shimmers of hope regarding B4P if it is taken as a broader understanding of the relations between private enterprise and the pursuit of peace. In all our cases, we find explicit or implicit examples of how local business has contributed to peace objectives. Local business leaders in particular are uniquely positioned to navigate 10 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN conflict economies as well as to transform them into peace economies. Yet local businessmen in situations of conflict are usually and understandably not too eager to become overtly visible, for their own political, reputational and personal risk reasons. As a result, we advocate policy that would act as a force amplifier for such examples, finding ways to support those local business initiatives that intervene meaningfully in conflict situations. To wit, this is as of yet a case-by-case evaluation and is likely to remain so given that under the panoply of recurring superficial elements, no conflict is alike. Notes 1. UNGC, Business for Peace. 2. Ganson et al., ‘Boardrooms to Battlefields’. 3. UN, Secretary-General’s Remarks. For more on business-SDG ties, see Barkemeyer et al., ‘What Happened to Development?’. 4. O’Connor and Labowitz, Measuring Human Rights. 5. See Oetzel et al., ‘Buiness and Peace’; and Miklian, ‘Mapping Business-Peace’ for summaries. 6. See e.g. Richmond, ‘Peace in the 21st Century’; Kolk and Lenfant, ‘Partnerships for Peace’; and Ford, Regulating Business for Peace. 7. See e.g. Oetzel and Breslauer, ‘The Business and Economics of Peace’; Darendeli and Hill, ‘Uncovering Relationships’; and Oh et al., ‘Violent Conflicts’. 8. Sorens and Ruger, ‘Globalisation’. 9. Forrer and Katsos, ‘Business and Peace’; Kolk and Lenfant, ‘Hybrid Business Models’; Rettberg, ‘Need, Creed and Greed’; and Miklian and Rettberg, ‘Business Strategies’. 10. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Beyond the State; and Higate and Utas, Private Security in Africa. 11. Oetzel and Miklian, ‘Multinational Enterprises’; Katsos and Al-Kafaji, ‘Business in War Zones’; Kolk et al., ‘Embracing the UN’. 12. Miklian and Bickel, ‘Business, Development Aid and Local Peace’. 13. Fort, Diplomat in the Corner Office. 14. Ganson and Wennman, Business in Fragile States; Ganson et al., Capacities and Limitations; Bull and Aguilar-Støen, this issue. 15. Miklian et al., Business and Peacebuilding. 16. Hönke, ‘Business for Peace?’. 17. Schouten and Miklian, ‘Business-Peace Nexus’. 18. A related concern is that funding for such events typically relies on beneveloent benefactors, with no real sustainability model to fall back upon if/when donor tastes change. 19. Jabri, ‘Peacebuilding’. 20. See Miklian, this issue for more. 21. Musa and Horst, this issue. 22. Azam, ‘Transport Infrastructure’. 23. Dua, Chokepoint Sovereignty; and Schouten, Private Security Companies. 24. Cooper, Africa since 1940; and De Grassi, ‘Beyond Gatekeeper’. 25. Miklian, this issue. 26. Miklian, ‘The Dark Side’. 27. Marijnen and Schouten, this issue. 28. Hoelscher and Rustad, this issue. 29. Rolandsen, this issue. 30. Bull and Aguilar-Stoen, this issue. 31. See Leonardsson and Rudd, ‘The Local Turn’, for a good overview. 32. Austin and Wennmann, ‘Business Engagement’; and Martin and Bojicic-Dzelilovic, ‘It’s Not Just the Economy’. CONFLICT, SECURITY & DEVELOPMENT 11 33. This logic is central to the Norwegian Business for Peace Foundation, a key actor in the B4P space with its annual Business for Peace awards. The presentation of this idea at the UNGC B4P inaugural meeting in 2014 received significant positive traction, and has driven several guiding documents within the business-peace community. 34. Harvey, Spaces of Neoliberalisation; and Boone, ‘Territorial Politics’. 35. See also Miklian, ‘Role of Business’. 36. Kim, ‘Refugee Crisis’. 37. Le Billon, ‘Peacebuilding’. 38. Miklian and Schouten, ‘Fluid Markets’. 39. Manning and Trzeciak-Duval, ‘Situations of Fragility’. 40. Ganson et al., ‘Boardrooms to Battlefields’; and Miklian et al., Business and Peacebuilding. Acknowledgements Research for this issue was funded by the Norwegian Research Council project ‘“Business for Peace” as Development Aid in Volatile Environments’, RCN project number: 237723. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributors Jason Miklian (PhD, Development Studies, NMBU; MSc, International Relations, London School of Economics) is a fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo. Miklian’s primary topic of study is the ‘Business for Peace’ paradigm, exploring the varied business engagements in global peace-building and development in conflict-affected and fragile states. He has published extensively on the role of the private sector in peace and conflict, and on conflict resolution and regional security more generally, with area expertise in Colombia and South Asia. Peer Schouten is a postdoctoral fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies, an associate researcher at the International Peace Information Service and a Conflict Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. His research focuses on conflict dynamics in Central Africa and its entanglements to outside dynamics. He has published on such topics as international relations theory, infrastructure in peace-building, and the politics of roadblocks in Congo and the Central African Republic. ORCID Jason Miklian Peer Schouten http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1227-0975 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7453-6463 References Abrahamsen, R. and M.C. Williams, 2011. Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Austin, J.L. and A. Wennmann, 2017. ‘Business Engagement in Violence Prevention and Peacebuilding: The Case of Kenya’. Conflict, Security & Development 17(6), 451–472. 12 J. MIKLIAN AND P. SCHOUTEN Azam, J.-P., 2013. ‘Transport Infrastructure and the Road to Statehood in Somaliland’. In Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent, eds. P. Chuhan-Pole and M. Angwafo. World Bank, Washington, DC, 155–166. Barkemeyer, D., L.P. Holt and S. Tsang, 2014. ‘What Happened to the “Development” in Sustainable Development? 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