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.
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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
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