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Business, Human Rights and Peace: Linking the Academic Conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2020

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Abstract

The fields of business and human rights (BHR) and business for peace (B4P) have overlaps in how they view business in society and in their multidisciplinary nature. This paper seeks to build on the work of BHR scholars in connecting with the B4P scholarly community, to bridge the divide by explaining the elements of the B4P literature that might be of interest for BHR scholars, and to describe a joint research agenda for scholars in both fields. The paper begins with a literature review of the major assertions and findings of B4P on the role that business can and should play in enhancing peace. Similarities and differences in approach and theories between BHR and B4P are then noted. A common research agenda is proposed that BHR and B4P scholars may use as a starting point for broader collaboration.

Keywords

business and human rightsbusiness for peacebusiness in societypeace through commerce

Information

Type
Scholarly Article
Information
Business and Human Rights Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 221 - 240
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

I. Introduction

Over the past 20 years, business and human rights (BHR) as an academic field has grown exponentially,Footnote 1 largely in line with practitioner interest in the subject.Footnote 2 BHR is a multidisciplinary attempt to define and create scholarship and practice guidelines around the role of business with respect to human rights.Footnote 3 The permeable boundaries between academics and practitioners in the space has been one of its defining and most admirable features.Footnote 4 The ‘core’ academic disciplines contributing to BHR have been in law and business ethics.Footnote 5

Over the past decade, another multidisciplinary academic field, business for peace (B4P), has begun to take shape.Footnote 6 Emerging from the management,Footnote 7 political science,Footnote 8 lawFootnote 9 and business ethicsFootnote 10 fields, B4P has had substantially less communication between academics and practitioners. Much of this has related to practitioners’ willingness to call almost any non-negative impact on society ‘peace enhancing’,Footnote 11 while academics have sought more evidence to help determine what actions do – and do not – enhance peace, particularly in conflict zones.Footnote 12 The latter efforts have been fraught with difficulty.Footnote 13 Indeed, the malleability of the term ‘business for peace’ has led to its use by a variety of actors in spite of their disagreement about what it means.Footnote 14 In the academic space, progress has been slower but with substantially more agreement on definitions other than that for ‘peace’.Footnote 15

Scholars in BHR are often as unaware of B4P work as B4P scholars are of those in BHR. This paper seeks to build on the work of BHR scholars in reaching out to the B4P scholarly community,Footnote 16 to further bridge the divide by explaining the salient elements of the B4P literature that might be of interest for BHR scholars, and to sketch out a joint research agenda for scholars in both fields. The paper begins with a literature review of the B4P field. Within B4P, the initial assertions set out by Fort and SchipaniFootnote 17 and Oetzel and colleaguesFootnote 18 have been examined empirically although mainly qualitatively, insofar as that has been possible, by a number of scholars from different fields. The main elements of the assertions have largely been supported by evidence, although with some very important and limiting qualifiers. In the second section, the similarities and differences between the B4P and BHR fields are detailed. The third section sets out a proposed research agenda based on these similarities to help scholars from both fields learn more from one another and shine light on blind spots in each field. Both fields have much to gain from such a collaboration given their focus on how business can (and cannot) enhance human well-being, and that both seek better ways to advise business on how to pursue the respective goals of peace and human rights. The fourth and final section summarizes how this research agenda might take shape.

II. Business for Peace as an Emerging Academic Field

Various disciplines address the concepts of peace and conflict.Footnote 19 Within B4P as an academic space, reconciling the large amounts of research done on peace and violence with the extensive research done by business and management scholars has been difficult. What follows is an overview for BHR researchers of the state of the B4P field in order to set out a basic understanding of the standard concepts and terms, how they are used, and their implications for B4P research.

A. The Foundations of B4P

The question first posed by Fort and SchipaniFootnote 20 is perhaps still the best starting point when looking at the field from the outside: why should business care about peace at all?

First, the economies of all nations are increasingly global.Footnote 21 This is especially true in certain industries such as financeFootnote 22 and technology,Footnote 23 but is by definition true of any country that is part of the international supply chain of goods. What happens in one part of the world impacts the entire world, but today this is not a truism that applies to business; rather, it is a truism because of business. The private sector is the major reason why these supply chains exist as they do, and why many of these industries are so intensely interwoven.Footnote 24 It is, in other words, due to private actors and the laissez-faire approach to trade of many governments in most contexts that has allowed for this level of interconnectivity.

Second, violence globally affects an ever-larger group of people and is increasingly costly. The cost of violence in 2017 (the last year for which data are available) was $14.76 trillion or roughly 12% of global GDP.Footnote 25 The economic consequences of violence globally have gone up 16% just since 2012Footnote 26 and those costs are not evenly distributed – those countries directly experiencing civil wars or massive refugee flows bear the highest burdens with over 50% of the GDP being spent on violence-related economic costs.Footnote 27 Civil wars are both particularly devastating and prevalent. Over 80% of total violent conflicts since 1980 have been civil wars, representing over 90% of the total deaths due to violent conflict.Footnote 28 Estimates by the United Nations (UN) have found that civil wars directly impact the lives of almost 1 billion people each year.Footnote 29 These factors impose a cost on business both in terms of increased costs imposed on their global operations, but also in lost revenue.Footnote 30

Third, and perhaps most important for multinational businesses, the growth rates of developed economies have flattened while those of developing economies – especially those that are conflict-plagued or ‘post-conflict’ – are substantially higher.Footnote 31 If companies want high growth rates, they will have to go to conflict zones and places likely to become conflict zones to achieve them. This core point about growth rates underpinned Prahalad’s base-of-the-pyramid arguments.Footnote 32 Since that landmark piece, ‘base-of-the-pyramid’ markets have become identified as those with high rates of poverty. Yet the initial pieces on the ‘base-of-the-pyramid’ included two large and often overlapping groups: the global poor and those in fragile and conflict-affected states.

From these foundational insights, researchers in the field, but especially OetzelFootnote 33 and Katsos,Footnote 34 have pulled together the empirical evidence from other fields that are the basis upon which B4P is built. After ‘why should business care about peace?’, the next essential question in the B4P field is under what circumstances can and do businesses enhance peace?Footnote 35 Empirical evidence in political science and economics has largely disproven the suggestion that trade and private sector activity reduce conflict between groups,Footnote 36 replacing it with what is sometimes called ‘liberal’ or ‘capitalist peace – free trade and democracy, rather than just any trade and similar government structures are what keep nations at peace with one another.Footnote 37 However, even this assertion has come under considerable fire.Footnote 38 The B4P field does not assume all business enhances peace. Instead, it is concerned with those businesses which, through their activities as private sector actors and members of their communities, bolster factors that lead to peace and undermine factors that lead to conflict. This does not mean companies simply ought to do ‘business as usual’ as some businesses wrongly claim.Footnote 39 Rather, it is about a set of activities that business can engage in to advance peace if conditions are right. The conditionality of the context is best described as a paradox: a business or group of businesses may be able to help make the immediate micro-level conditions more peaceful, while themselves benefiting from and enhancing the macro-level conditions that breed conflict.Footnote 40

Benefiting the search for answers to these questions is the widespread agreement on the ‘hard facts’ of conflict zones. Since the end of the Cold War, most conflicts have been intrastate – that is, civil wars.Footnote 41 The days of two countries waging war directly against one other are largely – although not entirely – over. Proxy wars remain a problem, but more as a symptom of the widespread problem of civil wars and the governance vacuums that they create, not as their cause.Footnote 42 If anything, the strength of international law’s mandates about what makes a ‘sovereign nation’ are largely the cause for these developments.Footnote 43

Approximately half of all conflicts involve countries returning to violent conflict within 10 years of the end of a previous conflict, and countries where conflict has ended retain a 40% chance of returning to conflict within 10 years.Footnote 44 Akin to recidivism for prisoners, conflict recurrence is a more-or-less established ‘fact’ of conflict zones. A related finding, one that underpins much of the B4P field, is that economic development is a key means of reducing conflict recurrence,Footnote 45 with its impact being substantially larger on reducing future violence than democratic elections.Footnote 46 Recent work in development economics on the ratio of population to resources as a major predictor of conflictFootnote 47 adds further pressure on the private sector, a major user of these resources, to manage underlying peace and conflict factors.

Fragile and conflict-affected states, the main areas of study for B4P researchers, are all contextually unique yet share quite a few similarities. Among the major similarities are political and economic uncertainty,Footnote 48 disrespect for the rule of law,Footnote 49 depleted physical and human capital,Footnote 50 a damaged financial system,Footnote 51 and heavy reliance on foreign aid.Footnote 52 Conflict zones also suffer from institutional deficiencies that lead to corruption, degradation of social trust, and more violence.Footnote 53 These countries are regularly ‘trapped’ by their own institutional histories in a vicious cycle of violence and its associated maladies.Footnote 54 High levels of black-market economic activity is also typical because the government monopolizes the formal economy, forcing anti-government groups to use the informal and black economies to fund their activities.Footnote 55 Black markets have been found to provide some benefits for certain types of legal activities,Footnote 56 but generally black-market activity is viewed as a hindrance to transitioning towards peace.Footnote 57

B. Foundational Differences within the B4P Field

In spite of substantial agreement, the B4P field is often at odds with itself with respect to what types of businesses, activities and impacts qualify as ‘business for peace’. Critics often view these as essential failings within B4P.Footnote 58 For the most part, it means that there is a wide diversity of what is often included in the conversations by those within the field.

The philosophy, political science, sociology, psychology, economics and management disciplines have all attempted to define ‘peace’.Footnote 59 When defining ‘peace’ in specific terms – that is, ‘positive peace’ – the definitions often become confusing, ill-defined or impractical.Footnote 60 ‘Negative peace’, or the absence of violence,Footnote 61 is common among all definitions of ‘peace’. But even here we see great divergence. ‘Violence’ for Galtung,Footnote 62 the founder of peace and conflict studiesFootnote 63 and instrumental in the founding of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), which funds a great deal of B4P research, is any avoidable limitation of human potential. This ‘violence’ can be either actual or structural, that is, built into social structures either consciously or not. A broader definition of ‘violence’ would be hard to craft. Meanwhile the more quantitative studiesFootnote 64 focus on numbers of dead and wounded. These definitions are easier to measure, but unable to capture the antecedents of violence often linked with human rights violations. Without a consensus on its definition,Footnote 65 the ‘peace’ component of ‘business for peace’ remains on delicate footing.

Further complicating matters is defining what is meant by ‘business’. Some studies, especially in political science, have taken ‘business’ to mean tasks traditionally done by the private sector, even when done by non-profit-making entities such as government, workers’ collectives, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs).Footnote 66 Others, especially those rooted in management and organization studies,Footnote 67 have focused on profit-making entities that engage in profit-making activities in conflict zones as the focus of various studies. There are additional problems related to focus. Among some scholars,Footnote 68 companies are the key unit of analysis, with large multinational corporations (MNCs) playing a key role. Among others,Footnote 69 the conflict zones themselves are the unit of analysis with all private sector activity taken into account. Both perspectives provide valuable insights, but comparing empirical results across them can be challenging.

With respect to impact, reduction of violence – whether actual or structural – is always a key component. Studies exploring comparative peaceFootnote 70 – that is, the relative peacefulness of different countries – have relied on the premise that structural violence is a hindrance to positive peace in the same way direct, physical violence is. These studies presume that peaceful societies experience both negative peace and a general lack of structural violence. In the economics literature, positive peace does have quantifiable measures.Footnote 71 For example, countries that have high levels of structural violence (although low levels of direct casualties) are classified as being not as peaceful as those countries with low levels of both structural and direct, physical violence.Footnote 72

For the B4P field, peace is not just the absence of violence, and conflict is not always overtly violent. Understanding the full complement of definitions for peace and conflict support richer and more robust conceptualizations addressing business and peace. The general agreement around the ideas, but not the precise definitions, of peace and conflict is important for business and human rights scholars to note. Conflict can be about many different issues but is relevant for study when its actors go outside of established procedures for resolving them.Footnote 73 Violence is always when direct physical harm happens to a person or group of people, but may also be more.Footnote 74 In terms of comparing across conflict zones, B4P scholars have consistently preferred the Heidelberg Conflict Barometer, an annual report that takes into account both actual and structural factors in measuring and tracking political conflicts.Footnote 75

C. Empirical Work by B4P Scholars

In their landmark work on business and peace, Fort and SchipaniFootnote 76 first laid out the essentials of the argument that business activity can enhance peace. This theoretical basis was then expanded into the ‘Sketching the Terrain’ framework of Oetzel et al.Footnote 77 Scholars since then have built an empirical case to test the framework, insofar as it is possible.

First, business promotes economic development. This is the most basic form of violence reduction a business can engage in, yet it is also one of the most powerful. Firms generate economic benefits for the societies in which they operate by design. This does not mean that GDP growth per se will lead to peace. Rather, it means that economic development’s spillover effects on conflict zones can bolster the underlying factors that contribute to peace. These spillover effects include employing local workers,Footnote 78 transferring valuable technology,Footnote 79 making foreign direct investment,Footnote 80 and training local workers to engage in higher skill and higher productivity jobs.Footnote 81 By providing these basic inputs in conflict-sensitive regions, business helps advance economic development and reduce prospects for violent conflicts.

Second, business can engage in track-two diplomacy. Track-two diplomacy is usually defined as informal, non-binding negotiations that are explicitly intended to reduce conflict through face-to-face meetings,Footnote 82 but it also refers to any time corporations act as brokers between the different sides in a conflict.Footnote 83 Of the four factors discussed here, this is the highest level of explicit engagement that business has in the political process.Footnote 84 Within track-two diplomacy, however, there are multiple levels of engagement. Business can engage in conflict resolution through NGO partnerships that help to alleviate the causes of conflict,Footnote 85 through participation in global multilateral agreements,Footnote 86 and through direct informal negotiations between the two sides engaged in active conflict.Footnote 87 Westermann-Behaylo et alFootnote 88 have further suggested that multinationals could have greater influence on peace through the pursuit of corporate diplomacy.

Third, business can contribute to a sense of community and enhance social cohesion.Footnote 89 Management theorists are perhaps most familiar with the notion of community involvement as it is embedded within the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR).Footnote 90 By taking all stakeholders into account, rather than just the owners of the firm,Footnote 91 businesses can obtain their ‘social licence’ to operate in a foreign country.Footnote 92 This is especially important for reducing operational risks in conflict-sensitive regions.Footnote 93 Milliken et alFootnote 94 also note the importance of incorporating employee voice into the management of companies in conflict-affected regions as an important way to enhance the sense of community.

Fourth, business can promote the rule of law by adopting third-party standards such as international codes of conductFootnote 95 and engaging in conflict risk assessments before entering and while operating within conflict countries.Footnote 96 By adopting what the literature terms ‘principles of external valuation’, companies can advance the rule of law within countries by binding themselves to more stable international norms. Examples given for external valuations include International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26000, the UN Global Compact, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and the International Labor Organization’s labour standards.

Empirical work has also begun to establish what does not enhance peace. The large-scale extraction of wealth – sometimes in the forms of natural resources, sometimes in the form of profits generally – from conflict to non-conflict zones, often with conflict actors taking a substantial percentage, leads to violence, not peace.Footnote 97 In fact, the core challenge of MNCs in conflict zones is how to get the growth gains necessary to justify the additional expense of operating in a conflict zone without undermining peace. Similarly, empirical work continues to find no evidence that risk assessment and enhanced due diligence foster peace, even for MNCs.Footnote 98 More often, these are tools for MNCs that allow them to escape legal liability in their home countries while still often operating in ways that undermine peace or withdrawing entirely.

III. Commonalities and Departures Among the Fields

What follows is an attempt to summarize the points of agreement and shared assumptions between BHR and B4P, as well as their points of departure. This will be key to examining where scholars in both fields might be able to work together to develop a joint research agenda.

A. Commonalities

A major shared assumption, if not the major shared assumption in both fields is that business plays a role in both human rights and peace. Both human rights and peace are social ends and so it is not surprising that both fields have seen some crossover appeal with CSR,Footnote 99 a much larger academic field than both BHR and B4P. In particular, the emergence of political CSR has direct linkages to both fieldsFootnote 100 given the interconnectedness of human rights and peace to political contexts.

Both fields have deep roots in efforts in the policy arena to the United Nations and in particular to the UN Global Compact. UN Special Representative John Ruggie and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which he developed over a 6-year period, were highly influential for both the BHRFootnote 101 and B4PFootnote 102 fields. The UN Global Compact, to date the world’s largest voluntary corporate responsibility platform,Footnote 103 has two of its main principles directly linked with the BHR agendaFootnote 104 and an entire action platform and annual eventFootnote 105 dedicated to B4P. BHR, however, has done a much better job of getting noticed in policy circles. BHR scholars have been actively engaged in shaping the policy debate,Footnote 106 while the policy debate is ahead of scholarship in the B4P space.Footnote 107

BHR and B4P also have similar scholarly debates about the responsibility of business. Scholars in both fields line up on the side of a more limited set of roles and responsibilities for business with respect to human rightsFootnote 108 and peaceFootnote 109 and other scholars in both fields argue for a more expansive understanding of those roles and responsibilities.Footnote 110 Those who argue in both fields for a more limited set of responsibilities and roles often rely on institutional approaches, that is, that certain institutions – governments, international organizations, some NGOs – within the international order have responsibility over these domains (human rights and peace) and business responsibilities can only be understood within this institutional context.Footnote 111 Others within both fields have argued for responsibilities and roles independent of those institutions, usually on ethical groundsFootnote 112 and/or practical grounds such as the power and leverage of MNCs over institutions.Footnote 113

Both fields have a tendency, to their detriment, to focus on MNCs, in particular those in the extractive industries.Footnote 114 In B4P, the MNC focus is particularly pronounced in theoretical frameworks.Footnote 115 The empirical work has, however, been more balanced. BHR, through increasing awareness particularly among scholars, has been substantially more conscious in recent years of the variety of businesses for which human rights is a major concern, such as the apparel industry,Footnote 116 security firmsFootnote 117 and agribusiness,Footnote 118 to name just a few. In both fields, the awareness of scholars of the detriments of focusing only on particular industries or on particular sizes of companies seems high compared with even a decade ago.

B4P and BHR are also similar in how they handle the responsibilities of business towards their respective focus areas.Footnote 119 In B4P, the negative and positive duties of business are often framed as the negative duty to prevent violence and positive duty to enhance peace.Footnote 120 There is some disagreement within the B4P scholarly community as to whether all business should have the positive duty to enhance peace, given the role many firms play as systemic drivers of conflict contexts.Footnote 121 The BHR field seems substantially clearer on the negative duty of respecting human rights and the positive duties of protecting victims and remedying human rights violations,Footnote 122 normative and positive law interpretations notwithstanding.Footnote 123 This provides an opportunity for both fields to look at where their respective duties for business overlap and where they diverge.

B. Points of Departure

As noted above, the fields share an assumption related to the role of business in what are social goods: peace and human rights. In the B4P field, there is disagreement among scholars about what exactly the private sector’s role should be with respect to peace. This disagreement is rooted in what some scholars have noted is a paradox:Footnote 124 a business might be promoting peace in one particular instance, while benefiting from the conflict (or promoting it indirectly) at a macro-level. This paradox is often apparent for both local companies and MNCs: a company’s mere presence in a conflict zone may be directly benefiting one of the conflict actors, meaning that any initiative locally to ‘enhance peace’ is inherently contradictory.Footnote 125 BHR does not seem to have this paradox: a company’s protection of or respect for human rights in one instance is independent of its disrespect or failure to protect human rights in another instance.

BHR scholarship is firmly rooted in the legal foundations of corporate personality.Footnote 126 B4P, perhaps to its detriment, has been less focused on legal foundation issues. Much of this absence is because of the assumption that a business supporting peace is unlikely to incur legal liability for not enhancing peace in its home country. Again, one can see the MNC bias of both fields, but in particular how the focus on legal liability and due diligence impacts BHR. BHR especially through the UNGPs are focused heavily on due diligence.Footnote 127

BHR scholars have also extensively developed and made arguments for the various moral obligations of a business – any business – with respect to human rights.Footnote 128 Although there is disagreement (noted above) on the extent of those moral obligations given the institutional context within which human rights and businesses exist, there is substantially less controversy within BHR than within B4P for which the moral obligations of business with respect to peace are substantially underdeveloped. Beyond the work of Fort, there is in fact scant mention of the moral obligation to enhance peace by business. It is either assumed or not mentioned at all.

A related limitation among B4P scholars compared with BHR scholars has been their overwhelming focus on positive impacts that businesses can have on peace. They have largely ignored scholarship that shows the situations in which business and the private sector generally have negative impacts on peace, an issue raised most clearly by Ganson.Footnote 129 BHR, on the other hand, has had a much more balanced approach, stressing the many failings of businesses in specific instances to uphold their responsibilities with respect to human rights and mentioning those cases where businesses have a positive impact.

As a result, BHR has a much better developed set of due diligence guidelines that are highly context dependent and specific.Footnote 130 B4P, on the other hand, has only a few empirically rooted guidance documents for companies and policy makersFootnote 131 and a wide variety of one-size-fits-all prescriptions that, in practice, often have the opposite effect.Footnote 132 BHR has similar difficulties dealing with conflict zones, as some scholarsFootnote 133 have noted that the focus on due diligence among MNCs has led to their being less focused on the different ways they impact conflict zones by their presence.

Another important difference between B4P and BHR is the range of issues that each field examines and their multidisciplinary character. B4P takes a holistic approach by examining the myriad ways in which MNCs and other businesses impact the underlying roots of conflict through economic development, social cohesion, corporate diplomacy and capacity building. B4P scholars often do this by extensively examining research in other fields, but particularly in peace and conflict studies, economics and political science. BHR scholars, although dealing with a wide range of human rights issues and business practices, generally zoom in rather narrowly on human rights and have yet to engage more broadly with the underlying roots of human rights abuses.

B4P and BHR scholars are often discussed as subfields of much broader academic disciplines, but the scholars who have pursued those fields have ended up being quite different. Both have their roots in law, yet the business side of B4P has largely been taken up by management and sustainability scholars, rather than by business ethicists who have generally engaged in normative, rather than empirical scholarship on the subject. The ‘peace’ portion of B4P has largely been taken from the peace and conflict studies field, which is itself a mixture of political scientists and economists. Put differently, outside of legal studies BHR seems to have a strong appeal to theorists with a humanities background, while B4P has largely attracted empiricists with a social sciences background. This split need not exist – increasing work across both fields could bring a more empirical approach to BHR, which has recently been pointed out as one area in need of development within BHR.Footnote 134 On the other hand, developing theory, in particular theory rooted in the existing business ethics conversation, is a necessary step in the development of B4P.

BHR has spent a great deal of time creating and debating legal and ethical frameworks related to whether and how business should interact/engage with human rightsFootnote 135 and then use case examples to flesh out exactly how they play out in the field.Footnote 136 B4P has largely skipped the conversation about whether supporting peace is morally or legally required, mostly because of the work of Fort, who, as a lawyer and business ethicist, was perhaps best positioned to dismiss both by arguing, ‘Is anyone really going to argue that business has an obligation to enhance peace, especially if peace is defined as its negative variety, i.e. the absence of violence?’. Indeed, corporations committing violent acts (or having others commit them in the company’s name) are among the easiest for BHR scholars to deal with.

So B4P scholars started asking the natural follow-up questions. What can business do in order to avoid violence being committed against it and/or having to use violence to protect itself? What should business do in order to promote broader non-violence, which is, we can all usually agree, better for business with exception of a few specific industries? Even the arms industry largely prefers peace to war from a profit margin standpoint – peaceful countries buy more expensive, higher margin military items (e.g., planes, missiles, drones) than non-peaceful countries (e.g., guns, bullets, body armour). So B4P work has been split between theoretical work seeking to flesh out exactly what B4P means and empirical work on what it looks like in practice.

IV. Methods, Theory and Issues: Towards Integrating BHR and B4P Conversations

Given the similarities and relative strengths of researchers working in both BHR and B4P, I propose below a means of integrating the academic conversations of both fields with the hope that, by relying on each other’s strengths, both fields may become more visible and be better acknowledged. The proposed agenda for cooperation is structured along methods, theory and certain sub-issues.

A. Methods

BHR as noted above is particularly strong with respect to normative explication, while B4P scholars have a relative strength in developing empirical work. BHR scholars could help B4P scholars begin to examine the ethical case for whether and how business should enhance peace. This is potentially the largest methodological area for collaboration given the extensive work in (non-business) ethics on peaceFootnote 137 and the relative lack of engagement on it within the B4P space.Footnote 138 Those BHR scholars who are business ethicists could provide the necessary rigor to develop ethical models for how and why business should engage in peace, something that has only been touched upon lightly by B4P scholars to date.Footnote 139 For the BHR literature, B4P scholars could help pave the way for better empirical analysis, moving beyond single company case studies to multiple case studies, more in-depth qualitative methods, and could perhaps help in designing frameworks that are more capable of quantitative analysis. This latter component could be especially important to researchers and practitioners looking to create metrics associated with the human rights performance of companies.

B. Theory

Another avenue for cooperation exists in crafting theory. B4P scholars in particular often look to human rights policies and due diligence practices, but not at the underlying academic theories that motivate them. Taking a more in-depth approach by engaging with BHR scholars on the theoretical underpinnings of practice could be an interesting step for both fields to take, especially given the highly connected nature of academic–practitioner dialogue in BHR.

Within the B4P space, a common response among business people, especially senior leaders, is the reluctance to label their activities as being related to peace, even when they very clearly are.Footnote 140 Scholars have noted that this reluctance seems to derive from an unwillingness by business to ‘take sides’, or rather, to be perceived of as ‘taking sides’, in an active conflict. The work by FortFootnote 141 highlights reasons why businesses shirk this perception: business is a mediating institution in conflict situations that requires trust from all sides to maintain that role. Westermann-Behaylo et alFootnote 142 go even further by suggesting that businesses which maintain that trust are in a position to engage in corporate diplomacy that can help alleviate conflict, which would not be possible if the business was partial.

Yet the work on political CSR and its relation with BHR seems to suggest that scholars within BHR understand very well the opportunities and problems associated with business acting as a political actor. The work of Scherer and PalazzoFootnote 143 and Schrempf-Stirling et alFootnote 144 in particular acknowledge the implicit political role that business plays in the current, highly globalized environment. One potential avenue for research between BHR and B4P scholars is then to examine the role of political CSR in conflict contexts, building upon the initial work done by Kolk and Lenfant,Footnote 145 Jamali and MirshakFootnote 146 and Idemudia.Footnote 147

Another point of cooperation would be with respect to legal mechanisms to enhance both fields. BHR has pushed quite effectively for legislative reforms globally to tackle the problem of business violating or failing to respect human rights globally. This approach to human rights is admittedly quite defensive and many scholars have advocated for more proactive approaches. A proactive legal requirement to protect human rights would likely look quite similar to one that promoted peace and would hopefully move companies beyond due diligence standards and the off-loading of legal liability. This would also help further understanding related to a core dispute within the B4P space, that not all businesses in all contexts should attempt to take on the positive duty of enhancing peace as it is too fraught with difficulty.Footnote 148

As noted earlier, BHR takes a much more balanced approach to the positive and negative impacts that businesses have on human rights, in particular through case studies.Footnote 149 B4P researchers often focus only on the positive impacts on peace, even in empirical work.Footnote 150 B4P scholars need not look far for examples of cases where business has had a negative impact on peace: very often the same BHR cases that indicate negative human rights impacts have negative peace impacts as well.Footnote 151 The UNGPs explicitly mention the difficulties for business of upholding their human rights obligations in conflict contexts.Footnote 152 B4P scholars could provide needed context for BHR scholars examining business cases in conflict zones, while BHR scholars could offer their experience in documenting the negative impacts of businesses.

C. Issues

The most obvious commonality of BHR and B4P is business. This unit of analysis may be the most fruitful issue for collaboration. In empirical work that examines how business approaches human rights or peace, B4P and BHR scholars might look to each other to ask who is working on similar businesses in order to combine efforts at examining both human rights and peace.

Examining what ‘peace aware’ human rights due diligenceFootnote 153 and CSR policies and practices might (and do) look like also seems a potential avenue for BHR and B4P researchers to work on jointly. BHR scholars have a high degree of awareness of which companies are leading on human rights due diligence policies. B4P scholars can examine these due diligence policies to see if they support underlying factors that underlie peace. Both sets of scholars can then work together to examine the impact on the ground in conflict zones of these policies and practices. Some initial recent workFootnote 154 has already attempted to match up B4P practices with potential peace outcomes, but BHR scholars could provide the experience of drafting and implementing practice-oriented due diligence guidelines. B4P scholars could also benefit BHR scholars in their work on due diligence by providing feedback on the potential peace impacts of human rights guidance.

A large missing piece of the BHR and B4P debates also relates to the role of capitalism and the institutional structures may enable business to operate more freely, but may also make human rights violations and violence more likely. This would require a critical perspective on business, especially multinational business, as just the newest manifestation of oppression by rich nation-states over the rest of the world. The role of business in this critical perspective is not ancillary, but central to understanding how structural violence manifests itself throughout the world. This last point is one that the founder of peace studies, Johan Galtung, has made numerous times over his career.Footnote 155 It has been largely avoided by scholars in business-related fields probably because of its implication: that business is not just a source of human rights and violence problems around the world but may be the most critical manifestation of the cause of those problems, i.e., modern capitalism.

V. Conclusion

The fields of BHR and B4P both have substantially the same aim: to analyse the role of business in a global problem with legal, moral and political dimensions. They are also concerned at their core with the societal impact of business. Depending on the author and the forum, B4P has been viewed as a subunit of BHRFootnote 156 and vice versa. Footnote 157 Both perspectives are correct. An important component of the impact of business on human rights is how business operates in conflict zones and the relationship between the promotion of human rights and promotion of peace. Similarly, there cannot be peace in most contexts without human rights: it is a necessary but perhaps not sufficient condition.

Given this strong inter-relationship of objectives and assumptions, the avenues for joint research outlined above are not only possible, but would make both fields more rigorous and context-specific in their assessments and prescriptions for business actions. I argue, like other BHR scholars,Footnote 158 that BHR and B4P scholars have much to offer each other in both approach and emphasis.

Footnotes

*

Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics, School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Conflicts of interest: The author declares no conflicts of interest.

References

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