Introduction

Business actors in zones of conflict – especially but not only those in the natural resources sector – have often been conceived of in negative terms: as entities requiring either significant regulation, as epitomized by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the Kimberley Process, and Publish What You Pay Us, or significant amounts of ‘handholding’, encapsulated in various ‘do no harm’ initiatives such as the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (OHCHR, 2011), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Conducting Business in Weak Governance Zones (OECD, 2006). Slowly but surely, however, the notion that business is an actor requiring a degree of control to mitigate its nefarious impacts has given way to the idea that businesses can serve as ‘active agents of peace, stability and long-term development’ (Miklian and Schouten, 2014: 2). This shift away from businesses as purely negative actors towards their discursive recasting as peacemakers and peacebuilders has been shepherded by the UN ever since former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's speech at Davos (UNSG, 1999) in 1999, where he called for a ‘new partnership among governments, the private sector, and the international community’ (Tesner and Kell, 2000: xxii).

Since then, businesses have featured prominently on the international stage. In 2004 the UN Security Council established a working group on ‘the role of business in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and postconflict peacebuilding’ (Deitelhoff and Wolf, 2010: 3); in 2011 a private sector focal point was appointed to the UN Peacebuilding Office (Ford, 2015: ix); in 2012, the UN Secretary-General's annual report on postconflict peacebuilding explicitly underscored the need to engage business in the process of sustainable peace for the first time (Ford, 2015: 4); and, John Ruggie's ‘Protect, Respect, Remedy’ framework focused almost exclusively on the role of businesses operating in conflict-affected and fragile states (Ford, 2015: 67). More recently, in 2017 the Global Alliance for Reporting on Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies hosted an event at the General Assembly entitled ‘Better Business for a Better World’ to discuss how the private sector can engage with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Goal 16 (Conroy, 2017).