The political economy of fragility : Business , conflict and peace in Sierra Leone (original) (raw)

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

Conflict, Security & Development, 2019

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 For Peace: The New Paradigm of International Peacebuilding and Development

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.

'Theorising a principled basis for engaging business in peacebuilding'

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

Business and Peace: Sketching the Terrain

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

Local experiences of liberal peace: Marketization and emergent conflict dynamics in Sierra Leone

Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of these complex relationships, practices of peacebuilding are often far less nuanced. Instead there is a tendency to pin the hopes of fragile post-conflict states on establishing a liberalized and supposedly peace-promoting economy and a worrying absence of grounded assessments of the impacts of such policies. This article argues that the resulting lack of clarity regarding the local impacts of such peacebuilding mechanisms contributes to continued unwarranted enthusiasm for marketization among policymakers and practitioners. This issue is addressed directly by exploring the destabilizing and potentially conflict-inducing impacts of one foreign direct investment (FDI) project in rural Sierra Leone. The dominance of liberal approaches to economic policy within peacebuilding has recently combined with a surge in large-scale FDI projects, often labelled as 'land-grabs', which can be interpreted as a direct embodiment of the liberal peace paradigm. While the liberal peace assumes that such projects will help by paying taxes, rebuilding state capacity and employing idle young males, the article illustrates that among local populations such projects can be experienced as deeply disruptive and potentially conflict-promoting. It therefore describes four specific mechanisms by which the project in this setting endangers Sierra Leone's still precarious transition to peace. The article concludes with recommendations for peacebuilding theorists, policy advocates and practitioners trying to navigate the difficult waters of post-conflict peacebuilding by way of large-scale FDI and marketization in general.

Business and Peace: A Need for New Questions and Systems Perspectives

BUSINESS, PEACEBUILDING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, 2019

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

Mapping Business-Peace Interactions: Five Assertions for How Businesses Create Peace

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