The role of private companies in violent conflicts has gained increasingly more attention in recent years. Although the private sector is often associated with sustaining conflicts, companies are also assumed to be self-interested as well as able to support the prevention, settlement and transformation of violent conflicts. This book explores the role of the private business sector during the civil war and the peace process in Guatemala. It examines and analyses the corporate positions during this period, aiming to add to a better understanding on the potentials and limits of integrating private business actors in conflict transformation.

Peacemaking and the Extractive Industries addresses a significant gap in research on the political and diplomatic role of multinational corporations in peace processes in intrastate conflict: Corporate Peacemaking. The author focuses on corporations in the oil and mining sectors, supporting or participating in peace negotiations and mediation. The chapters explore national-level peace processes, as well as those at community and global levels. While the focus is on extractive companies, the findings are valuable to companies from all industries looking at peace-related processes. This ground-breaking book gives a comprehensive picture of how Corporate Peacemaking currently works, how it can be developed and implemented, and how it is likely to impact global governance and corporate culture in the future. The book demonstrates that Corporate Peacemaking has the potential to be a powerful element in international governance and peace efforts; and Ralph shows through the business case that companies, as well as communities, will benefit. Ralph presents a new framework for Corporate Peace that will assist companies from all sectors in countries experiencing violent conflict, in addition to instability, human rights abuses and poor governance. Based on rigorous academic research with practical case studies, it is essential reading for practitioners, academics, policy-makers and NGOs.

This chapter outlines the various ways in which business has been part of peacebuilding processes in conflict-affected societies in Latin America. With a focus on El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia, it shows that there is not a uniform model whereby private sector actors define their interests and strategies in relation to peace talks and peacebuilding processes. Rather, factors related to the nature and intensity of conflict, the economic and international context, company traits and private sector organizational forms, as well as access to the policymaking process play an important role. Whether peace is achieved or not ultimately depends on a variety of factors. However, as illustrated here, business can have an important impact on the holding of talks, on agreement substance, and on the speed and depth of implementation. This chapter is a draft version of a paper that will be published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics, edited by Gary Prevost and Harry Vanden.

This book focuses on the economic dimensions of peace processes and examines the opportunities and constraints for assisting negotiated exits out of conflict. Various works have addressed the economic characteristics and consequences of armed conflicts over the past two decades, including issues such as ‘blood diamonds’, natural resource wars, economically motivated armed violence, self-financing conflict, or the complicity of companies and state elites in conflict economies. However, rather than treating these issues as obstacles for peace, this book explores whether they can be opportunities for peacemaking by adopting a political-economy perspective. The book looks at income sharing from natural resources as an opportunity for forward-looking peacemaking strategies, and the implications of deal-making in situations in which war economies and insecurity provide strongmen with disproportionate political and economic power. The book also highlights that peace processes are not necessarily about the rectification of a conflict’s ‘root causes’, but rather about what matters most to the main stakeholders at the moment when a peace process starts taking shape. Finally, efforts to establish a lasting peace need to go beyond the traditional set of actors associated with peace processes. The strategic involvement of donor agencies, companies, and diaspora communities can strengthen forward-looking peace processes. The book will help both student and practitioner audiences to better understand armed conflicts and their belligerents, optimize the planning and management of peace initiatives, and shape expectations in peace agreements. It will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict studies, development studies, International Political Economy and International Relations in general.

The intersection of business, peace and sustainable development is becoming an increasingly powerful space, and is already beginning to show the capability to drive major global change. This book deciphers how different forms of corporate engagement in the pursuit of peace and development have different impacts and outcomes. It looks specifically at how the private sector can better deliver peace contributions in fragile, violent and conflict settings and then at the deeper consequences of this agenda upon businesses, governments, international institutions and not least the local communities that are presumed to be the beneficiaries of such actions. It is the first book to compile the state-of-the-field in one place and is therefore an essential guide for students, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners on the role of business in peace. Without cross-disciplinary engagement, it is hard to identify where the cutting edge truly lies, and how to take the topic forward in a more systematic manner. This edited book brings together thought leaders in the field and pulls disparate strands together from business ethics, management, international relations, peace and conflict studies in order to better understand how businesses can contribute to peacebuilding and sustainable development. Before businesses take a deeper role in the most complicated and risky elements of sustainable development, we need to be able to better explain what works, why it works, and what effective business efforts for peace and development mean for the multilateral institutional frameworks. This book does just that.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 The term peace process is now widely used to describe attempts to manage and resolve conflict. As the nature of conflict has changed, so the range of available tools for producing peace has grown. Alongside a plethora of political actions, there is now a greater international awareness of how peace can be brokered and policed. As a result, peace processes now extend well beyond the actuality of ceasefires and an absence of war to cover legacy issues of victims, truth and reconciliation. This book expertly examines the practical application of solutions to conflict. The first part analyses various political means of conflict management, including consociational power-sharing, partition, federalism and devolution. The second explores the extent to which these political formulas have been applied - or ignored - in a wide range of conflicts including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, the Basque Region and Sri Lanka. Comparative Peace Processes combines optimism with a realist approach to conflict management, acknowledging that the propensity of dominant states to engage in political experimentation is conditioned by the state of conflict. It will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in general theories of political possibilities in peace processes and the practical deployment of political ideas in conflict zones.

Private corporations are rarely discussed as playing a role in efforts to curb civil violence, even though they often have strong interests in maintaining stability. Violence often damages the infrastructure necessary to deliver goods to market or may directly target companies. Corporations also have a normative obligation to conduct business in ways that promote peace. While there are historical examples of firm-instigated violence and firms reaping benefits from instability and conflict, there is also evidence that corporations proactively engage in peacebuilding. For example, firms devise programs to promote economic development, offer access to education, and employ former combatants. In The Building and Breaking of Peace, Molly M. Melin develops a theory of the conflicting roles corporations play in both building and preventing peace. Melin shows that corporations engage in peacebuilding when there is a gap in the state's capacity to enforce laws, but they also weigh the opportunity costs of peacebuilding, responding to the need for action when conditions enable them to do so. Firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, and proactive firms can increase the years of peace in a country. At the same time, an active private sector can make it harder for states with ongoing conflict to reach an agreement, as they act as an additional veto player in the bargaining process. Including original cross-national data of peacebuilding efforts by firms in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa from 2000 to 2018, and in-depth case analyses of corporate actions and outcomes in Colombia, Northern Ireland, and Tunisia, Melin shows that corporations help to prevent violence but not resolve it. In examining the corporate motives for peacebuilding and the implications of these activities for preventing violence and conflict resolution, the book builds a more holistic picture of the peace and conflict process. The findings also help explain why armed civil conflicts persist despite the multitude of diverse actors working to end them.