Ganson on Business and Conflict Prevention

Brian Ganson (University of Stellenbosch Business School, Cape Town, South Africa) has published a paper with the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform (2011, Series Paper No. 2) in connection with their conference on “Strengthening International Support for Conflict Prevention.” From the Introduction:

Practitioners, scholars and institutional actors focus on the predatory aspects of business in fragile environments (“business and conflict”), as well as on the need for private-sector engagement for jobs and security (“business and peace”). They have over the last decade collectively generated an enormous body of normative advice for companies, with the hope of decreasing the negative impacts and increasing the positive potential of business in conflict environments.

Drawing on over 50 interviews with company representatives and their advisors, this paper attempts to make sense of the experience of managers struggling to put that advice into action. It concludes that increased attention to the individual skills, organisational capabilities and inter-organisational mechanisms that enable companies to act more constructively in conflict environments provides a complementary lever for conflict prevention. It invites a broader discussion of how to move from a largely anecdotal to a more rigorous and systematic understanding of capacity for conflict prevention in ways that can aid both companies and those hoping to influence their actions reach their goals.

Hat tip to Michael Moffitt.

3 thoughts on “Ganson on Business and Conflict Prevention”

  1. Decreasing the negative impacts and increasing the positive potential of businesses in conflict areas thru these advices would definitely help them strive thru this bad economic times. The problem would be on how managers would apply these advices and they need to be trained on how to apply this.

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