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The new FriEnt publication on Business and Peace examines how corporate behavior and efforts can contribute to alleviating the risk of violence, reducing fragility and promoting peace.
Economic development is an important basis for peace, and actors in
this field are numerous and varied. However, economic development
does not automatically bring about peace. Rather, resources from
economic actors, certainly large-scale investments, and the benefits
of private sector involvement (such as job creation) brought into
a conflict environment become part of the conflict. When the context
is also characterised by fragility, there is little to prevent competition
for resources from escalating into violence. It takes unconventional
approaches from economic actors to contribute to peace,
and collaboration from peacebuilding actors to make the “development-
peace link” work. Do the – now numerous – standards and principles help to connect the two fields and influence company behaviour for peace? What conceptual and practical issues have to be considered when trying to convince companies to generate different impacts, make violence less likely and reduce fragility?
On the occasion of the publication of the joint CDA / International Alert / FriEnt Dossier “Business and Peace: It Takes Two to Tango”, FriEnt invited about thirty experts from academia, German and international peacebuilding and development organisations to two online events to discuss and further develop central issues raised in the dossier. While the first event in February 2021 was dedicated to the peacebuilding potential of medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs), (you can find the synthesis here) the second one in March 2021 looked more closely at multi- / transnational companies (MNCs / TNCs) and measures, standards and principles to influence their behaviour for peacebuilding. Ben Miller, one of the authors of the dossier, gave an introduction; Hannah Peters (Swedwatch), Evelyn Dietsche (swisspeace), Sabine Dorlöchter-Sulser (Misereor) and Dominik Balthasar (KfW) then kicked off the discussion with comments from their areas of experience. This briefing is a synthesis of the presentations and discussions in this second workshop.