Business For Peace: The New Paradigm of International Peacebuilding and Development Jason Miklian and Peer Schouten PRIO/NAI Working Paper 8 December 2014 Abstract 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. Keywords: business, development aid, conflict, Business For Peace (B4P), business ethics, liberal peace, Corporate Social Responsibility, peacebuilding, private security, checkpoints, multinational corporations (MNCs) 1 Introduction “No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.”1 While usually invoked as a punchline, Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” embodies a ferociously contested idea: that business has a direct, positive and lasting effect on peace. This idea has gone beyond mere punditry the last few years, and a radical transformation has marked the discourse on the role of business in peace efforts. In this article, we present the first systematic exploration of Business For Peace (B4P), an umbrella term that encapsulates a new paradigm of international development. To give just a few examples of its current purchase, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon launched the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) B4P platform in 2013, Norway launched a Business for Peace Foundation in 2007, European business leaders formulated the Ypres Manifesto on Business for Peace in 2014, and Sri Lanka has had a Business for Peace Alliance since 2002. The B4P paradigm establishes multinational corporations (MNCs) as partners in local peacebuilding. With donors increasingly fatigued by traditional mechanisms of aid delivery, B4P is taking a lead role in framing the post-2015 development agenda at the national and global levels. The B4P philosophy also entails a move by international institutions to help corporations move beyond ‘do no harm’ and engage more directly in actions that contribute to peace. Supported by the United Nations, World Bank, and nearly all major international development organizations, B4P aims to retool international businesses in conflict zones and fragile states as active agents of peace, stability and long-term development. In doing so, B4P is more than just an effort to renew established agendas. It contains the seeds of a more substantial paradigm shift in the global peacebuilding and development architecture. Its discourse forwards deep-seated assumptions regarding the relationship between business and peace, states and companies, and politics and economics that are as powerful as they are contested. However, there has been little study of these contemporary dynamics in either the theoretical or practical realms. With the role of business in peacebuilding to date best is summarized as little more than a commitment to avoid contributing to insecurity (and corporate risk) within already fragile environments, some wonder if businesses should be urged on a larger role as agents for 1 (Friedman 1999: 248). To add insult to injury for poor Mr. Friedman, both Ukraine and Russia have many McDonalds outlets. 2 peace. And while over 4,000 businesses from 140 countries have agreed to implement the UN Global Compact’s Business For Peace principles (UNGC 2013c), their concrete contributions to peace and development to date remain unclear. Before B4P’s principles are incorporated across the remainder of the international community’s multilateral development aid portfolios, it is time to take stake of the central tenants of this new agenda. As a conclusive analysis of this dynamic and the complex of issues it raises is beyond what a single scholarly effort can accomplish, our aim here is to bring B4P to the forefront of research on business, development, and conflict. To paraphrase Helmke and Lavitsky (2004:726), by broadening the scope of institutional analysis to include B4P interactions, scholars from varied disciplines can gain a better understanding of the incentives driving political behavior in fragile states, which should result in both better research and better theory. In this article, we show how five major contemporary debates influence how the B4P philosophy is implemented and received in fragile societies today. They are: first, if MNCs should be involved in peacebuilding at all; second, if MNCs are involved, what should they do; third, how do MNCs and development actors define and model ‘peace’ activities; fourth, how businesses navigate conflict economies; and fifth, how businesses engage with informal economies. Although the evidence is not yet strong enough to allow us to take sides in these debates, we highlight existing examples to show how these discussions are shaping the international community’s multi-billion dollar development agenda as well as how businesses see their new role as peacebuilders. In support, we first assess the new dynamics of B4P by engaging with theoretical assumptions about the relationship between business, conflict and politics, and review the conditions and ideas that led to the debates over the Business For Peace framework. We then discuss the five debates in depth, showing how they are reflective of today’s operational realities. We conclude with suggestions for forward research on this rapidly emerging topic. The Philosophies Behind Business For Peace To understand why the B4P philosophy has the power and permeance that it carries today, we must contextualize it within the deeper interconnection between business and peace. B4P did not emerge out of the blue, but appeals to and invokes deep-seated assumptions regarding the linkages between enterprise, government intervention, and societal outcomes. While the contemporary interest in business-peace relationships is an outcome of post-Cold War 3 priorities, it is also anchored in the Cold War competition between rival capitalist and communist political economies. The Western Bloc advocated modernization theory, i.e., that aliging with free market democracy would generate peaceful and prosperous societies (Jahn 2006). If this in practice tacitly meant supporting non-democratic regimes at times (Doyle 2005: 465), it fits within long established paradigms of international political economy that can be grouped under the broad umbrella of liberal peace theory. While there are arguably as many liberal peace theories as there are liberal peace theorists, we here distinguish between two broad strands of thought within this diffuse set of ideas and assumptions. The first strand derives from International Relations and originates ideas about the influence of domestic institutions on foreign policy. The second forwards the beneficial effects of the expansion of free markets on society. We call the former ‘positive’ liberal peace theory for the emphasis it places on institutions and liberal peacebuilding efforts as drivers for peace. However, it does not generate substantive expectations about the role of business in peacebuilding. The second—also referred to as ‘capitalist peace theory’ to differentiate it from the former—speaks directly towards the impact of business activity on social issues and can be called ‘negative’ liberal peace theory in that its assumption is exactly that business activity inherently contributes to peace, regardless of institutional action. Positive liberal peace theory argues that interstate peace requires three pillars: republican institutions of representation, a commitment to basic human rights, and transnational interdependence (Doyle 2005). The doctrine is associated with names such as Immanuel Kant (1795), Joseph Schumpeter (1919), and, more recently, Francis Fukuyama (1989), scholars who combined elements of republican or democratic politics and ‘the spirit of commerce’ in different ways to arrive at the idea that domestic institutional dispositions lead to ‘cosmopolitan ties’ that positively correlate with peaceful foreign policy inclinations (Doyle 1986). This branch of liberal peace theory is ‘positive’ in that it emphasizes the role of liberal institutions to bring peace over the agency of markets (Ruggie 2003). It holds that transnational institutions and regimes can overcome the collective action problems and transaction costs that lead to conflict by promoting interdependence, and that potential externalities of unrestrained free markets can and should be curbed by embedding them within an institutional architecture. Positive liberal peace theory directly informs the agenda that has dominated until the onset of B4P. 4 While the empirical evidence and core definitions remain contested (Peceny 1997), protagonists of the paradigm hold that “empirical confirmation of the liberal peace is exceptionally strong” for the relations between liberal democracies (Doyle 2005: 466) and interdependent market democracies indeed converge on global issues (Mousseau 2003). However, reflecting insights dating back to Kant, how liberal regimes act towards the outside of their interdependent sphere—how engage they with illiberal countries or fragile states—is still of concern. This question underpins the B4P agenda not only because it concerns the engagement of predominantly western corporations in fragile and volatile states, but also because of the shifting geopolitical context wherein liberal dogmas find less resonance in the foreign policy agendas of rising powers such as the BRICS (Ikenberry 2008). In contrast, negative liberal peace theory—also called the capitalist peace theory—holds no such interest in active interventions by institutional means. Institutions and political interventions to foster peace are generally considered both unhelpful and distorting. Instead, it draws from the inherent assumption of the positive role of free markets on society. The Washington Consensus through its agenda of dismantling state-led economies to foster peace and development in the Global South through deregulation, privatization and liberalization forms the most poignant enshrining of the negative liberal peace agenda (Berdal & Mousavizadeh 2010). This strand questions whether corporations should be involved in the operational side of peace, as it necessitates beyond their core business, and thus distorts markets. As Milton Friedman (1970) famously put it, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profts,” and no more. Considering markets as positive-sum games, negative liberal peace theory argues that from the individual pursuit of gain, positive outcomes will aggregate at the macro-level of societies. With assumptions focusing on market actors in a hypothetical institutions-free context, it speaks more directly to the core concern of B4P, which pertains to the relationships between MNCs and a fragmented bundle of affected groups within weak state contexts, to envision economic growth as an inherent driver for peace. Negative liberal peace theory is also not new. The belief that economic entrepreneurship will lead to peace and development can be traced back to John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689), where he argues how the spatial expansion of entrepreneurship and property rights will lead to civic government with peaceful characteristics.2 However, just as with positive liberal peace theory, the empirical evidence in support of the negative liberal peace is mixed at best (cf. 2 Departing from more recent neoclassical liberals that drive the negative liberal peace agenda, Locke recognized the value of political institutions promoting the spread of liberal values (cf. Jahn 2006). 5 Barbieri & Schneider 1999). Besides the contested legacy of the Washington Consensus in fragile states (Szeftel 2000), such issues as the share of arms industries and private security in global GDP and the existence of conflict economies—where capitalism thrives on conflict— call into question the assumption that business expansion is inherently a driver of peace (IEP 2014; Morrissey 2006). However, many post-conflict countries where B4P actors are engaging seem open to the negative liberal peace orthodoxy in prefering trade above relations with western donors that have often been hamstrung with conditionalities that recipient governments have come to resist. As hinted at above, positive liberal peace theorists since Kant have been relatively united in the belief that while anarchy is overcome between liberal countries, the insecurity of anarchy prevails outside of the ‘liberal bubble’ of integrated states (Doyle 1986: 1162). The relevance of positive peace theory remains limited outside of the liberal sphere and for within-state (civil war) conflicts. It is within this conundrum that liberal peacebuilding has been concerned. Liberal peacebuilding comprises a weak international concensus around active interventions outside the ‘liberal bubble’ to establish the main institutional components of the liberal peace, broadly through mechanisms of democratization, promotion of the rule of law and free markets in fragile and post-conflict environments (Barnett 2006; Richmond 2006). It entails the translation of assumptions about the interactions between economic and political institutions into an agenda to intervene outside the liberal bubble and extend the liberal peace—in other words, reflecting the positive liberal peace theory, ‘pacification through political and economic liberalization’ (Paris 1997: 56).3 However, B4P’s rise is indebted to the fact that in practice, the liberal peacebuilding agenda has failed precisely in the places where it has been needed most. A decade after the launch of the Millennium Development Goals these initiatives have brought economic gain in lowincome countries where efficient institutions are already in place, but fail to lift up those living in the more challenging fragile and conflict-affected zones (Dollar & Levin 2006). In the latter, liberal institutional projects are often locally highly contested, do not address root causes of conflict, and can end up benfitting only certain factions of society – outcomes that also befell Cold War-era modernization theory (Jahn 2007). As one case study put it, the liberal peace in practice can turn out to be neither liberal nor peaceful (Eriksen 2009). But absent an alternative, liberal peacebuilding continues to be the frame around which contemporary peace action is 3 Note that Kant posited that intervention to establish liberal peace abroad should be shunned (Jahn 2006: 92). 6 organized (Paris 2010), not least because it still promises peace and development through the agency of western donors, on the premise that ‘we just need to get the conditions right’. Business For Peace – embedding for-profit liberal peacebuilding Taken together, the two branches of liberal peace theory help us understand B4P’s emergence. After the Soviet Union fell in 1989, multinationals were at the forefront of a series of transformations described in positive terms as globalization and deepening of trade relations, or more critically as the withering of state sovereignty through submission to market pressures. This was the decade in which the ‘end of history’ was proclaimed, from an optimist belief in the spread of free markets and democratic institutions in line with the negative liberal peace agenda. Corporate globalization thrived, and extractive MNCs in particular expanded operations in countries that suffered civil conflict as Cold War support was withdrawn. And extractives became a part of conflict dynamics. Cases including Shell in Nigeria (Zalik 2004) and DeBeers in Angola and Liberia caused a questioning of business-conflict relations from governments, NGOs and multilateral institutions—leading one researcher to speak of the extractives-development nexus as ‘illiberal peacebuilding’ (de Oliveira 2011). Governments and NGOs began to re-consider the relationship between business and conflict, and one major development was the understanding that corporations are inherently political, and will always influence conflict dynamics. This recognition, perhaps paradoxically, sits well both with negative and positive liberal peace approaches. For negative liberal peace theorists, corporate expansion has an inherently pacifying effect on conflict dynamics, while positive liberal peace approaches by the UN and INGOs used it to reconstrue the private sector as a partner in conflict prevention and resolution to try and prevent such failures in the future and increase stability in vulnerable areas (International Alert 2000; Banfield et al. 2003; Bennett 2001). However, corporations were slow to display a self-awareness as conflict-relevant actors. Efforts to involve MNCs in peace efforts arose concomitant with increasing frustration at stagnant outcomes (and withering critiques) of both the free trade paradigm associated with the negative liberal peace paradigm and traditional liberal peacebuilding, encouraging donors to consider new development ideas. With one billion people living in countries or regions affected by conflict or postconflict violence (World Bank 2013), these “conflict-affected and high-risk areas” or “volatile environments” are the core focus of the international community’s development agenda today (UN Global Compact 2010). MNCs and state-owned firms alike 7 have increasingly been drawn into the discussion as the UN, World Bank and other international organizations have reported on success stories of public-private partnerships worldwide that try to stimulate peaceful development through poverty reduction, socioeconomic growth, and security provision (Brainard et al. 2007; Deitelhoff & Wolf 2010; UNGC 2013b). Enshrined in the Global Compact, businesses should be committed to “peace” and incorporate conflict sensitivity into their day-to-day business practices. Beyond the extractives sector, B4P proponents envision incorporating the broader population of consumer goods and infrastructure businesses operating in conflict environments (UNGC 2010). MNCs operating in fragile environments are now asked “to become full partners in broader peacemaking and peacebuilding assessment, planning and execution” (Ruggie 2011), amid arguments that business-UN tie-ups are not only mutually adventageous but in fact necessary for the future success of UN operations in conflict zones (Ford 2014). In 2013, the UNGC launched “Business For Peace”, institutionalizing these developments. As perhaps the clearest articulation of the broader B4P paradigm, the UNGC’s initiative aims to “mobilize high-level corporate leadership to advance peaceful development through actions at the global and local levels in order to galvanize progress and scale up positive impacts, [a] leadership platform which will expand and deepen private sector action in support of peace” (UNGC 2013a). However, of the 10,000 businesses that are UN Global Compact signatories – including 1,200 UN-business partnerships for conflict-affected regions under the ‘Responsible Businesses Advancing Peace” program (UN 2013) – none have yet been considered to have violated the “Guidance on Responsible Business in Conflict-Affected & High-Risk Areas” framework adopted in 2010. Power dynamics are also opaque with MNCs an increasingly influential funding source for NGOs and the UN,4 while MNCs are in these areas first and foremost to profit from the interaction. Enthusiasm from private sector stakeholders is no doubt anchored in the fact that the framing of B4P has appealed to core values of the negative liberal peace paradigm, namely the belief that what corporations already do anyway—grow GDP and expand markets—are in fact key ingredients to peace (Oetzel et al. 2010; Miklian 2014), and that “a quick influx of capital and know-how is essential to serve as a counterweight to recidivist violence” (Gerson 2001: 106). For example, recognizing that economic underdevelopment forms a fertile soil for the recurrence of conflict, the UN Security Council included MNC stakeholders in the drive to 4 As one typical example, the share of MNC funding for the Brookings Institution has gone from 3% to 22% over the past decade (WaPo 2014). 8 attain the Millennium Development Goals, calling for more investment in fragile and conflict areas to stimulate development (UNSC 2009). This incidentally also aligns well with the inherent business motivation of gaining market access to consumer markets in countries with favorable demographic patterns, to outmaneuver increasing competition from Global South firms. Although businesses are often deeply entangled with peacekeeping missions (Pingeot 2012), B4P does not constitute a mechanism to send MNCs into a particular country in order to create and enforce peace. B4P is instead a new normative ideal in which businesses working in conflict zones should participate - and in which their operational presence positively contributes to peace by definition. The UNGC’s goal is to create a broad multistakeholder “epistemic community” composed of development organizations and MNCs with converging notions of “conflict sensitivity” and the importance of peace as a commitment of MNCs in volatile environments (Dahan et al. 2006; UNGC 2013b).5 To show how this influences just one donor government, Norwegian policy now echoes the UN B4P approach, notably the 2012 report “Business Creates Development” by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA 2012), and the 2010 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Development on “Evaluation of Norwegian Business-Related Assistance” (Norad 2010). These documents encourage for-profit aid investment, public funding of commercial ventures, and private sector assistance as a means to development in conflict and post-conflict settings—measures that could, conversely, be labelled very unliberal from a negative liberal peace commitment to free markets. In short, if negative liberal peace theory had hitherto guided corporate behavior in volatile environments—comprising a clear commitment to ‘do no harm’—B4P can be seen as an awareness by western governmental actors of unsatisfying results both of this attitude and its own earlier agenda, and an attempt to change course by making corporations partners to the institutional premises of positive liberal peace theory.6 We propose that B4P thus advocates a hybrid between positive and negative liberal peace agendas that can be called ‘embedded liberal peacebuilding’, where MNCs deliver on peace by operating under the conditions set by transnational institutions. If John Ruggie (2003) advocated a positive liberal peace agenda where free market liberalism should be embedded in global institutions, embedded liberal 5 This overlaps with the UN’s ‘Delivering as One’ policy to streamline operations and integrattion with the initiative on ‘Transnational Corporations and Sustainable Development.’ 6 Seen another, more cynical way, it is an effort by governments to shift project implementation risk to corporate actors at the root-user (“grassroots”) level. 9 peacebuilding takes this premise but shifts its focus from prosperity to peace, arguing that linkages between business and peace at the executive level will trickle down and lead to changing preferences and behavior at operational levels in volatile environments.7 At the same time, B4P does something new that is as subtle in character as it is all-encompassing in scope: now MNCs of all feathers are reframed as inherently political entitites with an a priori effect on peace.8 B4P’s potential to be a paradigm shift in peacebuilding therefore relies upon whether it will simply continue to appeal to negative liberal peace doctrines, or form a transnational epistemic infrastructure that will incorporate MNCs within a distinct positive liberal peace effort. Business For Peace in Action: Five Debates So, how does international support of corporate activities in volatile environments influence the political, economic, and social dynamics of peace and development? To be frank, we don’t yet know. But we do know that B4P’s core testing ground will be encounters in which MNCs work in conflict-affected contexts to produce new configurations of peace and conflict outcomes. Five debates confront us as MNCs expand into complex volatile environments under B4P: should MNCs be involved in peacebuilding and peacemaking, to what extent should they be involved, how should ‘peace’ activities be defined, how should businesses (and aid organizations) navigate conflict economies, and how to engage with informal economies. 1. Should MNCs be peacebuilders? First, many wonder if businesses should be in this business in the first place—can a ‘corporate peace’ also mean social peace? Various scholars, donors and development practitioners treat the thought of giving business a more central role in peace with suspicion and disapproval (Berdal and Mousavizadeh 2010; Hönke 2014). The track record of initiatives is not encouraging, in part because contemporary accountability mechanisms for B4P through the UN and donor governments are utterly toothless. To note, business participants at the 2014 UNGC Business For Peace meeting wearily cautioned if the world needs yet another low-threshold commitment that will cost them money to implement but might just be overtaken by the next holy grail of high-level multi-stakeholder initiatives a few years down the road.9 Academic critics similarly argue MNCs involvement with high-profile development actors leads to 7 Author interview, B4P Kickoff, Istanbul, September 2014. Author interview, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, B4P chairman, Istanbul, September 2014 9 Author observation, B4P Kickoff, Istanbul, September 2014. 8 10 “ceremonial commitments” (Lim & Tsutsui 2010: 1): voluntary, non-binding or unmonitored initiatives that legitimate corporate expansion into volatile environments but have little proven positive impact on peace or development (Gereffi et al. 2001). In addition, decade-old efforts to bring extractive MNCs into the fold of the UNGC have not translated into substantial gains. With compliance based on self-reporting, there is no mechanism to assess business priorities or the effectiveness of these activities. Where profit and development goals clash, MNCs are encouraged by international development actors to undertake operations that positively contribute for some metrics (such as GDP growth) but might exacerbate conflict in others. And without any mechanism to punish transgressors, the good companies get lumped in with the bad. Negative liberal peace scholars further argue that initiatives such as B4P amount to a positive normative veil that shrouds state sponsorship of corporate expansion to facilitate first-mover market access in volatile environments where competitition from emerging power actors is fierce. According to this philosophy, assistance to the private sector in any form constitutes a market distortion that will end up perverting the markets affected. The implication is that instead of business creating peaceful development, B4P is little more than a tool to defuse criticism of corporate expansion into conflict zones (cf. Banerjee 2008). A core site of contestation in this first debate regards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR postulates that corporations should engage in ‘good corporate citizenship’ by making a positive governance contribution in their areas of operation (Carroll 1998)—something which apparently didn’t come naturally, as the negative peace creed would predict. Beginning largely as public relations efforts, CSR has grown rapidly over the past two decades. The CSR departments of some MNCs today have budgets, programs and mechanisms rivaling those of aid organizations (Valor 2005). In some settings they compete against traditional development aid allocation by NGOs and UN agencies, providing impetus to the B4P shift towards businesses as peace agents. Additionally, because of increasing convergence of discourse, implementation and subcontractors with traditional aid organizations (Avant & Haufler 2012; Cooley & Ron 2002), CSR has also begun to become a tool for the promotion of development (Barbara 2006). Some companies in conflict zones are beginning to market local peacebuilding 11 as part of their CSR package (Jamali and Mirshak 2010; JBE 2009)10, although there is too little evidence to assert whether this goes beyond window dressing. Others believe that MNCs should not be in the governance business. Momner (2002) argues that MNCs should see (non-liberal) development alongside corruption and rent-seeking as ‘risks’ to their ultimate goal of profit. While B4P attempts to fill governance voids through MNCs, empowering new non-state actors can in fact erode local government legitimacy, just as large-scale NGO projects have done (Miklian et al. 2012). Byrne (2014) sees the gap between action and responsibility for MNCs rooted in our very understanding of state sovereignty, as MNCs support international law advances that make their playing fields clearer but erode the power of nation-states all while defining their actions under ‘good governance’. The fact that many well-intended CSR policies are in effect standard-less and lack forward responsibility shows not only how hard it is to establish unitary global CSR frameworks in weak-governance conflict zones (de Colle et al. 2014), but echoes the debate in both the development and corporate sectors over whether MNCs should be peacemakers at all. 2. What should MNCs do? There remain large gaps between the ethics of ‘do no harm’ and the the ethics of ‘do something!’ for MNCs in conflict settings. Fort and Schipani (2004:348) illustrates today’s thinking, which reflects a departure from negative liberal peace premises, succinctly: “It is not any business that fosters peace; it is an ethical business that fosters peace.” But what does it mean to be ethical, and who decides what is ethical? For example, while shaming MNCs out of conflict zones in order to ‘do no harm’ may support a positive liberal peace agenda, their departure can leave a void for corporations of lower ethical inclination to fill (Patey 2013). For example, Talisman Oil was shamed out of former Sudan; this gap was filled by Asian firms who were disinclined to join western positive liberal peace initiatives. Thus, even if B4P would eventually contain mechanisms to enforce compliance and shaming, the question is whether even this would lead to net peace dividend on the ground. It also omits those local and national businesses that do not sign onto (or are not invited to) initiatives such as B4P but constitute an equally essential part of the business fabric of fragile environments. More fundamentally, while many MNCs have begun to raise ethical questions regarding their operations in conflict zones, the need to undertake this exercise has been eroded by B4P 10 The extractives Shell and Chevron were among the first to discuss explicitly how their operations could become conflict-sensitive (Hoben et al 2012; cf. CDA 2014: 7). 12 arguments that any type of business activity in these areas is better than nothing. Among B4P stakeholders, there is a consensus that normative progressiveness cannot be left to state actors and is a key contribution of the business sector11, which has often been conceptualized through the balance found between aid and trade (cf. Morrissey 2006). But for those convinced that MNCs can play positive roles, the question of what they do is still undefined, and in practice presents a mixed bag. Campbell (2009) notes the problems in Trinidad and Tobago when natural gas firms were asked for ‘contributions’ to development programs in exchange for access. The firms saw the payments as just another tax, the funds for development projects were not legally binding, and companies refused to pay because the monies were being diverted to politicians’ coffers. Some try to solve this thorny issue by returning to CSR as a solution, linking ethics, activities, norms and responsibilities together into ‘thick’ CSR mandates (Wiig and Kolstad 2012). However CSR heads at large MNCs often find that these ‘thick’ approaches are often too complicated to implement due to the competing needs of different in-house divisions (O’Riordan and Fairbrass 2014). CSR reporting on conflict mitigation and impact also remains limited. If such concerns make it into annual reports, they are almost always generic in nature (Kolk and Lenfant 2010). MNCs are weary of funding war-happy regimes, not least due to the reputational risks involved should the payouts become public knowledge. This wariness is conceived in-house as risk mitigation, but is often construed publicly as an unwillingness to help the host community. Leaders of corporations operating in volatile environments have emphasized that both MNC boards and host governments are weary of MNC muddling in contested issues as ‘peace’ and the redefinition of the highly politicized division of labor between (host) government and corporations in local governance.12 As CSR policies only carry limited influence over operational equations for MNCs in volatile environments (Yang and Rivers 2009), their lack of accountability mechanisms and poor track records of dispute amelioration for those affected in conflict zones gives pause (Prandi and Lorenzo 2011; Idemudia 2010). Returning to the belief that corporations working in conflict zones are ‘of the conflict’ from their very presence, and cannot ethically dismiss that this presence has consequences, MNCs have begun to undertake ‘traditional’ peacebuilding activities, including mediation of local grievances, (re)building health and education infrastructures, and promotion and empowerment 11 12 Author observation, B4P Kickoff, Istanbul September 2014 Ibid. 13 of disadvantaged communities. These activities often overlap with peacebuilding operations by multilateral development efforts in the same areas (Bachmann & Schouten 2014). It is then neither surprising nor, perhaps, undesirable that some form of coordination takes place among overlapping and competing efforts with potential peace effects in volatile environments. INGOs justify partnering with MNCs to establish a “business and conflict” agenda for best corporate practices of conflict resolution (Haufler 2010), but MNCs view these partnerships as a tool to manage political and reputational costs – not as an avenue for constructive engagement that would embed their operations in a positive liberal peace agenda. The international community is also increasingly supportive of MNCs defining their own ethical (or even legal) obligations. But as the operations and CSR divisions of most MNCs are different in-house entities, the ‘constraints’ hampering engagement in local communities are employed as reductive mechanisms to dilute local social concern through a series of controls and audits that merely project the appearance of participation (Guidi 2008). Or in other words, the risk is that MNCs fear allowing the ‘local’ to participate in the process lest they lose control of their project’s direction—and of their preferred framing of what constitutes ‘peace’. 3. Who gets to define peace? Who gets to define what constitutes a ‘peace contribution’ of businesses in volatile environments will be perhaps the biggest single predictor of B4P penetration. MNCs argue that the research and NGO communities need to ‘make a business case for moving beyond do-noharm’, i.e., quantifying the cost of business in ways that fit it within a corporate case to proactively work for peace.13 In-house, this can be framed under ‘best practices’ or other integrative business management philosophies (Godfrey 2005; Barton 2006) On the other hand, social and economic development—positive outcomes MNCs pride themselves for—do not in and of themselves equal peace or constitute contributions to mitigate root causes of conflict (CDA 2014: 3). This is a concern that development interventions also still struggle with, particularly as interventions of any source (developmental or business) that touch upon root causes can meet with substantial resistance from national stakeholders. Plugging sophisticated business models into peace equations may also create unforseen and contested peace models. Some extractive MNCs have defined their work as a driver of local peace and development in the “war” for legitimacy, even as fundamentally skewed access to 13 Source: interviews at B4P inaugural meeting 14 security and justice amount to structural—if silenced—human rights abuses in many fragile zones (Yakovleva and Vazquez-Brust 2011; Schouten 2014). Complicating matters, even the words ‘peace’ and ‘development’ are contested concepts to which different stakeholders attach different meanings, particularly considering the multitudes of perceptions within local communities due to differences in socio-economic position, gender, age and ethnicity. Reflecting the divide between members of the liberal peace and its outside, while B4P reflects an emerging consensus in the Global North on the meaning of peace and development, local populations often hold different views. While both companies and states see value in business-government-civil society engagements, policy debates in fragile states tend to favor peace through the lens of ‘post-political’ policies with ‘good governance’ as a cornerstone of project management in a ‘win-win’ relationship with INGOs and donor governments (Swyngedouw 2007; Bridge 2008). In other words, we’re in a world of high-level summits and exchanges that focus upon the creation and employment of appealing terms that have little actual operational meaning or forward guidance. For example, the findings from the first annual UNCG Business For Peace meeting in September 2014 prioritized issues like outreach, communications, branding and media strategy (UNGC 2014b) – suggesting that public relations components of CSR and B4P will continue to drive both agendas. ‘Win-win’ business logics can also have deeper consequences than the benign buzzwords suggest, especially if encouraging an econometric understanding of peace reduces peacebuilding to whatever numbers can express. This risks silencing voices whose understanding of peace might not be articulated in this technocratic discourse, disfranchising those who should be the principal benificiaries of B4P. Without a clear definition of “peace,” it is also hard to know if B4P succeeds on its own terms. There has been strong resistance against defining peace within some UNGC local networks for this very reason, even as they are highlighted as the key institutional infrastructure through which the UN’s B4P agenda is to be implemented (UNGC 2014b). Not defining “peace” allows it to form a ‘boundary object’, its vagueness allowing actors of different plumage to rally around its positive connotations without being held responsible for the costs. Hönke (2014) asks how the B4P agenda could ever be effective if those committing to the most prominent existing efforts still do not contribute to peace on the ground, and we agree. 15 Reflecting debates around liberal peacebuilding, if a commitment to global standards also entails the ambition to leave the affected population better off, who gets to define and assess whether the corporation is succeeding under the B4P agenda is paramount. Reflecting larger debates around the liberal peace (Richmond and Mac Ginty 2014), if the criteria are set in multi-stakeholder meetings in the Global North, B4P may lead to a ‘peace’ that is highly uneven and contested locally. How peace and war are defined in one situation is not necessarily generalizable to volatile environments elsewhere, given the infrastructurally and socially fragmented nature of societies in such settings – pre-emptively stifling the international community’s ability to institute a ‘Peace Code’ (MacNulty 2014) for MNCs. If B4P is going to be a genuine driver of peace, operationalizing the notion of peace likely requires it to be disaggregated and contextualized through grounded fieldwork for each specific operational setting affected by its ambition, and that the concrete outcomes associated with peace by different stakeholders are made explicit. 4. How should businesses operate within conflict economies? The influence and net effect of MNC presence upon local communities of the Global South is a matter of fierce contestation. This has two aspects as concerns B4P. The first is the well-known disparity between global commitments and local operating practices. Decades of experience of extractives operating in volatile environments draws a consistent picture of MNC usage of public and private security services in their operations that has created bunkerization and ‘statewithin-a-state’ effects (Ferguson 2005; Hönke 2013). Giving MNCs a global license to operate in volatile environments that involves the blurring of peacemaking and corporate logics risks exacerbating the root causes of insecurity. If a securitization of business is modeled after the securitization of development that was implemented under earlier liberal peacebuilding efforts (see Stern & Öjendal 2011), it might constitute an overall militarization of western engagement in fragile environments (Schouten 2014). A second aspect is the lesser-known disparity between our formal understandings of markets and those of conflict economies. We know that volatile environments contain sophisticated networks of conflict actors embedded in the local social, political and economic fabric (UN 2014). This tendency is so pervasive that scholars consider volatile environments structurally subject to a ‘political economy of conflict’ (Ballentine 2005), with state security forces and armed groups controlling territorial access and extracting money from all who wish to pass to survive (Le Billon 2008). When faced with aid groups and MNCs operating in ‘their’ volatile 16 environment, conflict actors often also extort them as well (Hansson 2013; Pottier 2006; Watts 2004) - so when MNCs expand into volatile environments, they become part of local informal conflict economy equations (Prandi & Lozano 2011; Scudder 2013). Recent analysis of casebased evidence from such disparate settings as Afghanistan (DuPee 2012), Nigeria (Idemudia 2010) and Colombia (US State 2013) indicates that MNC operations in volatile environments may even prolong or exacerbate conflict, notwithstanding explicit ambitions to bring a ‘development dividend’ to local populations (Miklian and Schouten 2013). One example of the kind of conflict-economy practices often encountered in fragile environments is that of roadblocks, and we use examples from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to illustrate our case. Roadblocks are ubiquitous in the DRC, and they can be distinguished according to the size of the transport flux they attempt to capture through sophisticated mechanisms of economic predation. Roadblocks have become vital to the survival of both rebel movements and their disenfranchised state security force counterparts (Schouten 2014). The DRC hosts a range of consumer goods MNCs that are increasingly encouraged to play peace and development roles. At the same time, they depend on market access for profit from distribution of their products and are as such confronted with checkpoints economies and other outwashes of Congo’s conflict economies. They mitigate entanglement by transposing risks to networks of security and logistics subcontractors that form the first line of defense, creating complex chains of contractors, subcontractors and subsidiaries to avoid liability and lessen reputational risks (Sassen 2006; African Union 2011). These networks are considered a structural necessity to embed operations in volatile environments. As one poignant case of a firm offering what many would think to be an innocous product, Heineken beer’s fully-owned subsidiary Bralima has been present in the Congo since 1923. Under Heineken’s stewardship, Bralima has survived decades of dictatorship, civil war and infrastructural deliquiscence to capture 75% of the domestic beverage market. To stay in business, Bralima has engaged with the full spectrum of actors in the Congolese conflict landscape: it pays checkpoint taxes to rebel groups amounting to millions of dollars, has state security forces on its payroll; and employs private security companies (PSCs) all to secure market penetration and product delivery (Schouten 2013). These PSCs are often owned by powerful political and military actors and constitute an informal way for MNCs in the region to buy political protection as well as physical security, even while they were committing largescale human rights abuses elsewhere (ibid). In order to sell its beer, Bralima (who also 17 distributes Coca-Cola products) must work with the conflict entrepreneurs whose core strategy is to become an obligatory passage point for anyone interested in doing business—whether that business is humanitarian or capitalist in nature (Schouten 2014b). Such practices are replicated across volatile environments worldwide (Abrahamsen & Williams 2011; Gumedze 2008). Unintended consequences of B4P-grounded pushes for market access can also hamper the distribution of access to security and justice to those most in need. Besides moonlighting as PSCs, many Congolese state authorities and security forces deploy the same checkpoint business model to capture resources from the capital flows circulating through the DRC’s limited infrastructural pathways. This challenge points to an important flaw in the B4P agenda: in presenting volatile environments as blank slates void of meaningful governance, the agenda assumes that key pre-existing dynamics of volatile environments do not pose any risk to the positive peace agenda. Dealing with conflict actors is not typically the core business of MNCs. Yet an increasing encouragement to operate in volatile environments means that they are inevitably confronted with ethical dilemmas like roadblock economies. Several case studies already show that checkpoint payments by consumer goods MNCs can even exacerbate local conflict through the very mechanisms necessary to secure local market access (Bennett 2002; Miklian & Schouten 2013). Mapping how MNCs navigate this landscape while minimizing risk accountability will constitute a core challenge for efforts aiming at a positive business role for peace rather than contribution to conflict. 5. How should businesses relate to informal economies? Fifth, B4P logics tend to downplay the fact that the lion’s share of markets in volatile settings are informal. Most existing research on business and conflict focuses on either aggregated trade data or extractive industries alone even though the latter constitutes only 21% of global NorthSouth trade (WTO 2012). The remaining 79% (including consumer goods, construction, and others) is still poorly understood—and even this figure excludes the informal sector that constitutes the core fabric of economies in most fragile environments. Local businesses in conflict settings are difficult partners for global initiatives, and excluded by the silent entry costs composed of access to technology, mobility and formal accounting systems. Promoting the expansion of formal-sector economies within which local entrepreneurs cannot compete implicitly entails a normative conception of what constitutes the ‘right’ kind of economy while sidelining transnational diaspora entrepreneurs, women associations and other informal actors (Mayer and Salih 2006; Cheng 2012; Sinatti and Horst 2014). 18 If B4P entails incorporating MNCs into development operations under the assumption that they are already powerful actors in volatile environments, the empirical picture is more complex. In the DRC, MNCs are the main contributors to the country’s 8% GDP growth rate, but taxation of MNCs only contributes 13% to the state budget as most profits are siphoned offshore or waived through tax breaks; further, over 90% of the Congolese economy is informal, and international efforts to generate peace attempt to formalize this section of the economy, believing it to be the host body to the parasites of rebel groups (La Porta and Shleifer 2008). However, economic entrepreneurs in the DRC are able to muster the costs of compliance, pushing more vulnerable populations depending for their livelihood on informal extraction further into illicitness. For example, Bralima contributes to ‘development’ by employing thousands of Congolese, but it also steers informal networks of below-subsistence level entrepreneurs through incentive structures to distribute its products in insecure areas where Bralima wishes to operate but does not do so under its own flag for fear of reputational risk, knowing that conflict funding is necessary. This division of labor between Bralima and informal economic entrepreneurs constitutes a transposition of risk on the latter in favor of the former. Yet it is also an example of the symbiotic dependency in which formal and informal markets live: consumer goods such as matches, mobile phone credit, cigarettes and indeed beverages provide a little informal income to many and the MNC producing them, in turn, need the virtually total market penetration of informal markets. Informal entrepreneurs also mimic MNCs, operating in networks that transgress porous national borders and tie into regional trade hubs and diaspora communities. This informal globalized economic assemblage is currently silenced within the B4P framework, in part because it is difficult to fit within institutional mechanisms developed with and for formalized western actors. Peace contributions of MNCs under negative liberal peace logics and formalization efforts then become associated instead with the positive liberal peace agenda as they operate within the informal economies that form the primary mode of survival in volatile environments. Thus, embedded liberal peacebuilding might also risk rewarding the same dislocation of functional local economies as ‘high modernist’ development schemes such as the Washington Concensus did earlier (cf. Ferguson 2005; Scott 1998). Even if host governments in fragile states prefer the macro-finance advantages of trade over aid (Schneps 2013), it has been asked how bringing in MNC signatories to B4P will ever benefit local populations or even local businesses (Younas 2008; Killick et al. 2005). For these reasons, the relationship of B4P 19 activities to the informal economies within which they operate will need to be reconciled if B4P is to have local relevance. Moving Forward: Deciphering and Generalizing the B4P Impact These five debates are of course more instructive than exhaustive, and show how any holistic navigation of business, development aid and conflict requires re-positioning our assumptions about actor motivations in conflict zones. As a hybrid between the positive and negative liberal peace agenda, B4P may become a parallel effort to existing aid infrastructures in the hopes that it will harness the strengths and leverage that businesses can bring to bear on questions of peace. Thus, if we want our better theory and better research, we can no longer compartmentalize the operational activities and CSR intitiatives by MNCs in fragile areas if we wish to find substantive guiding principles for those who wish to engage with B4P. We see several forward avenues. First, there is scope to build B4P theory across many different disciplines, including (but not limited to) political science and liberal peacebuilding, business ethics and management, humanitarian aid, governance, conflict studies, international relations, development studies and anthropology. This will help to systematically assess how economic liberalization, development assistance and conflict inter-relate. The field of business ethics has perhaps taken the strongest steps forward, exploring how companies can move from CSR to either Creating Shared Value (Haski-Leventhal 2014) or ‘gentle commerce’ in conflictsensitive zones (Fort 2014) as armed actors challenge existing solutions (Miller et al. 2014). However, we still need stronger empirics across the board. And although engaging with all of these strands was beyond the scope of this paper, it is essential for such discussions to take place. Second, we see significant value in comparative case study. B4P dynamics vary across companies and markets, across cases and regions, and can display tremendous variation over time. Ethnographic exploration of specific cases and large-n study of B4P dynamics will both hold immense value as we work towards the ability to make generalizable statements about this new paragidm shift. Beyond defining B4P as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, comparative study could explore under which circumstances MNCs can avoid excarbating conflict – and maximizing inclusve development - in volatile environments, and better understand where MNCs may even hold a 20 comparative advantage over other aid actors. All MNCs are not created equal either, and case study assessments could also explore and compare particular firms and sectors.14 Third, the B4P philosophy is already generating activities that will carry lasting impact in local communities. The entanglements and dynamics of MNCs in conflict settings influence local social, political and economic fabrics, so in order to assess B4P in comparison to traditional mechanisms of development aid delivery, we also need to compare whether and how MNC entanglements with conflict economies differ from those of INGOs. Here, best practices guidance for firms and practitioners will be valuable. One option is to revise the Due Diligence Guidelines for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas (OECD 2012) to also include non-extractives, but this is merely one way to provide a more developed knowledge base to identify commonalities and divergences to the existing literature. Given that it is as rapidly expanding as it is under-researched, we expect B4P to play a key part of the peace and conflict debate over the coming decade and beyond. 14 While new hybrid forms of corporations like ‘Social Corporations’ are beginning to gain traction in the United States, they do not yet constitute enough of an international role to be relevant in this debate. 21 References Abrahamsen, Rita, and Michael Williams, 2011. Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. African Union, 2011. Exploiting Natural Resources for Infrastructure Development: Policy Options for Africa. 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