What is Business for Peace?
Business for Peace (B4P) is the study of how private sector actors contribute to peacebuilding in conflict zones through their operations, investments, supply chains, and community relationships.
Key Insights
- Businesses operate as peace and conflict agents simultaneously: Private sector actors shape peace outcomes through economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy, rule of law, and security mechanisms. Source: Business and Politics, 2019
- The Peace Premium demonstrates financial returns from conflict transformation: Investment explicitly structured to contribute to conflict transformation generates measurable economic returns alongside peace impact, demonstrating sustainability of B4P. Source: Miklian & Katsos, 2025
- Small businesses create peacebuilding through demonstrated leadership, not policy: SME peace contributions depend on visible behaviors like cross-community employment, political neutrality, and community reinvestment rather than formal corporate programs. Source: Society and Business Review, 2025
Business for Peace emerged as a distinct scholarly field at the intersection of peace and conflict studies, development economics, and corporate social responsibility. Rather than viewing the private sector as merely a driver of conflict or profit-seeking actor disconnected from peace outcomes, B4P scholarship recognizes businesses as intentional and unintentional architects of peace.
The field examines how companies ranging from multinational enterprises to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can operationalize peacebuilding through strategic business decisions. This includes everything from employment patterns that cross communal boundaries, to supply chain governance that promotes rule of law, to deliberate conflict-sensitive business practices.
The Business-Peace Nexus
The Business-Peace Nexus framework reconfigures the public/private divide in global governance, demonstrating that businesses actively shape peace and conflict outcomes through their operations, supply chains, and community relationships via five key mechanisms.
Miklian and Schouten's foundational 2020 work in the Journal of International Relations and Development established that the business-peace relationship is not peripheral to peace studies but central to understanding how contemporary peace and conflict dynamics operate. Businesses are neither purely benevolent peacebuilders nor inevitable conflict drivers—they are strategic actors navigating complex political economies.
The five mechanisms through which businesses shape peace outcomes are:
- Economic Stabilization: Generating employment, tax revenue, and foreign exchange that reduce immediate incentives for conflict and build state capacity for stability.
- Social Cohesion: Creating cross-community interactions through markets, supply chains, and employment that build trust and reduce ethnic or factional polarization.
- Political Legitimacy: Business operations confer legitimacy on peace processes and post-conflict governments through investment signals and stakeholder participation.
- Rule of Law: Private sector engagement with legal institutions, contract enforcement, and governance standards strengthens institutional capacity for justice.
- Security: Business investment in local security architecture, private-public partnerships, and economic incentive systems can reduce violence and improve civilian safety.
Five Assertions for How Businesses Create Peace
Miklian's 2018 framework identifies five specific pathways through which business operations generate peace dividends in post-conflict and fragile settings.
Building on empirical research across multiple conflict zones, this framework moves beyond the mechanism-level analysis to articulate concrete ways that business action translates into peace outcomes:
- Economic Stabilization Pathways: Businesses create employment and income that reduce poverty-driven grievances and provide alternative livelihoods to conflict participation.
- Cross-Community Social Cohesion: Market interactions between formerly antagonistic groups through employment, supply chains, and consumer relationships rebuild social trust.
- Political Legitimacy for Peace: Business investment decisions signal confidence in peace processes and provide political cover for peace agreements.
- Institutional Development: Business demand for transparent governance, contract enforcement, and rule of law strengthens institutions that sustain peace.
- Localized Security Through Economic Incentives: Employment and economic opportunity at the community level reduce armed group recruitment and civilian support for violence.
Local Peacebuilding and Micro-Level Interactions
Local peacebuilding examines how everyday commercial transactions and small business activities generate peace dividends through sustained cross-community interaction and mutual economic dependence.
The "Footprints of Peace" coffee project in rural Colombia, documented by Miklian and Medina-Bickel in their 2020 Business & Society article, illustrates this dynamic at its most granular level. In a region scarred by decades of armed conflict, cooperative coffee production created daily interaction between farmers from different sides of historical divides.
These micro-level commercial interactions operate through repeated exposure, shared economic interests, and demonstrated trustworthiness. A farmer from a FARC-affected community purchasing supplies from a paramilitary-connected merchant, or two former rivals cooperating in a coffee cooperative, creates peacebuilding through practice rather than through formal peace processes. Commercial relationships build peace one transaction at a time.
Small Business as Peacebuilders
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operate as localized peacebuilders whose impact is shaped by citizen perceptions of leadership, community embeddedness, and conflict sensitivity rather than by formal corporate policies.
Miklian and Hoelscher's 2025 research in Society and Business Review reveals critical differences between SME and multinational enterprise peacebuilding. While MNCs bring capital, technology, and global standards, SMEs bring legitimacy, local knowledge, and community accountability. A small shop owner who employs youth from both sides of a conflict and maintains neutral political positioning can exercise peacebuilding impact that exceeds formal interventions.
SME peacebuilding depends less on written policies than on demonstrated behavior: Do they employ across community lines? Do they maintain neutral political stances? Do they invest profits back in the community? Are they perceived as trustworthy? These factors, grounded in leadership and embedded relationships, determine whether small businesses contribute to social cohesion or reinforce division.
20 Years of Business and Peace Scholarship
A comprehensive two-part review (Miklian, Fort, Katsos, 2024-2025) maps the evolution of Business and Peace as a field, positioning future research directions and unresolved questions.
Business and Peace scholarship has matured from exploratory work documenting whether businesses could contribute to peace, to increasingly sophisticated analysis of mechanisms, conditions, and contexts. The field has moved from case studies toward comparative research, from descriptive analysis toward causal inference, and from business-centric frameworks toward systems-level understanding of business roles in peace ecosystems.
Key developments include: increasing empirical rigor in measuring peace impact, growing recognition of how conflict shapes business behavior (not just vice versa), integration of gender analysis into B+P frameworks, attention to illicit business and conflict financing, and emerging focus on private sector roles in sustaining peace post-agreement.
Historical Perspective: What's Old is New Again
The business-peacebuilding relationship extends centuries backward, bridging 17th-century merchant networks and colonial trade systems with contemporary corporate peace initiatives in ways that inform modern scholarship.
Miklian, Katsos, and Alluri's 2019 analysis demonstrates that business has always played roles in conflict and peace—not newly. The Dutch East India Company maintained peace treaties with local rulers. 19th-century traders became conflict mediators in remote regions. Post-World War II business engagement in Germany and Japan accelerated reconciliation and democratic transition.
This historical perspective prevents contemporary Business and Peace scholarship from treating the private sector as a novelty in peacebuilding. Instead, it recognizes that capitalism, commerce, and conflict have been intertwined for centuries. The question for contemporary scholars and practitioners is not whether business engages in peacebuilding, but under what conditions it does so constructively, transparently, and equitably.
Key Publications
The following publications represent foundational and recent work in Business for Peace scholarship:
Frequently Asked Questions
Business for Peace studies how private sector actors contribute to peacebuilding through their operations, investments, and community relationships. It matters because businesses are significant actors in conflict-affected regions and their decisions shape whether economies develop peaceably or fuel violence. Understanding business peacebuilding potential is essential for both peace practitioners and business leaders.
The Business-Peace Nexus framework identifies five mechanisms through which businesses shape peace outcomes: economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy, rule of law, and security. It demonstrates that business-peace relationships are central to contemporary global governance, not peripheral.
Businesses create peace through five main pathways: generating employment and income that reduce incentives for conflict; creating cross-community interactions through markets and employment; signaling confidence in peace processes; demanding transparent governance that strengthens institutions; and providing economic opportunities that reduce recruitment to armed groups.
The Peace Premium refers to measurable economic returns from investment deliberately structured to contribute to conflict transformation. It bridges impact investing, development finance, and commercial lending by demonstrating that businesses need not sacrifice returns to achieve peace impact. Strategic investment recognizing peacebuilding potential can generate both financial and social returns.
Small and medium enterprises contribute through localized leadership, community embeddedness, and demonstrated trustworthiness rather than formal corporate policies. SME peacebuilding depends on visible behaviors like cross-community employment, political neutrality, and reinvestment in communities. While MNCs bring capital and standards, SMEs bring legitimacy and local accountability.
The business-peacebuilding relationship extends centuries backward. Dutch East India Company merchants maintained peace treaties, 19th-century traders mediated conflicts, and post-WWII business engagement in Germany and Japan accelerated reconciliation. This history prevents treating contemporary business peacebuilding as novel and reminds us that business has always been intertwined with conflict and peace.
The five mechanisms are: (1) Economic Stabilization—generating employment and revenue; (2) Social Cohesion—building trust through market interactions; (3) Political Legitimacy—signaling confidence in peace; (4) Rule of Law—demanding transparent governance; and (5) Security—creating economic incentives against violence.
In rural Colombia, a coffee cooperative brought farmers from opposed conflict sides together for daily commercial interaction. These micro-level transactions—purchasing supplies, cooperating in production, sharing profits—built peace through repeated exposure, shared economic interests, and demonstrated trustworthiness. Commercial relationships created peacebuilding one transaction at a time, illustrating how local business can generate peace dividends.
SDG 16 targets peace, justice, and strong institutions. Business and Peace scholarship demonstrates that private sector actors contribute directly to these outcomes through employment, institutional development, rule of law support, and conflict reduction. Private sector engagement is not separate from SDG 16 work but integral to achieving peace and justice in fragile contexts.
Jason Miklian is among the foundational scholars of Business for Peace, alongside collaborators including Pieter Schouten, Jennifer Katsos, Rajagopal Alluri, Timothy Fort, James Oetzel, Kimberly Hoelscher, and others. The field has grown significantly with contributions from scholars across business schools, peace studies, development economics, and international relations.