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Description
Introduction
IN 1999, WHEN I FIRST STARTED TO research and write about the topic of business and peace, finding a relevant literature was difficult. There was a rich literature in corporate responsibility ranging from ethics to social responsibility to citizenship to sustainability. There was a rich literature on peace research. There was even a significant amount of material on the general connection between macro levels of economic development and peace. But there was very little on what businesses can do to promote peace and security. Aside from theories about monetary flows and general corporate citizenship, what connection, if any, might exist between the actions corporations can take and resulting peace and security? That was an open question.
Shortly thereafter, Jane Nelson (The Business of Peace) and Virginia Haufler (A Public Role for the Private Sector) started to open up this door. Of course, the creation of the United Nations Global Compact gave a major boost to the consideration of corporate social responsibility generally and inevitably, given the aims of the UN, the Compact took a turn to looking at what businesses could do in zones of conflict. In 2001, I jumped in with my first article 'Corporate Makahiki: The Governing Telos of Business' and then went on to co-host (with Cindy Schipani) three conferences at the William Davidson Institute under the umbrella 'Corporate Governance, Stakeholder Accountability, and Sustainable Peace'. Those conferences generated two book-length special issues with The Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law and led to Professor Schipani's and my 2004 Cambridge University Press book, The Role of Business in Fostering Peace Societies.
From that point, what Notre Dame Dean, Carolyn Woo, has termed 'Peace Through Commerce' has taken off with conferences hosted by the University of Notre Dame, Case Western University, George Washington University and University of Maryland, with more on the way. Edited, single-author books and special issues on the topic are appearing on both sides of the Atlantic so that now it is hard to keep track of all that is going on. The AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), under Dean Woo's leadership, organised a task force on how business schools could address this topic. To someone who was in on this at the beginning, all of this activity is tremendously gratifying.
That gratification continues in the publication of this issue of The Journal of Corporate Citizenship. I am thankful to Malcolm McIntosh and Sandra Waddock for asking me to comment on these papers. I also want to congratulate the authors for contributing to this dialogue and hope that they continue to explore the important... |
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