Business and peace: the Colombia challenge

What is the role for the business community (local and foreign) in consolidating peace agreements?

This post is from Bogota, where this week saw the signing of a peace accord with the FARC rebel group following decades of civil armed conflict.

The country faces a significant and challenging history where business, human rights and conflict / security meet.

As chronicled by academics such as Angelika Rettberg, and as manifested in business-led organisations such as FIP, Colombia is no stranger to an active role for business leaders in encouraging, facilitating and indeed funding peace-making (informal and formal peace talks at the national and sub-national levels).

However, my role here this week is to talk about what next -- the peace-building phase that the agreement now heralds.

As Rettberg has noted, the Colombian private sector (and foreign investors in the mining, energy and agricultural sectors in particular) is now well sensitized to the idea of explicit business engagement in peace initiatives. Moreover, the government has taken a strong lead on issues of responsible business conduct -- for instance, Colombia is among the first countries in the world with a National Action Plan on 'Business and Human Rights' pursuant to the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on this issue.

Nevertheless (and in the shadow of the enormous legacy of this conflict more generally), a number of difficult questions remain to be addressed about how business leaders approach the challenge of making appropriate contributions to the national peace and reconciliation process.

These questions are not easily dealt with by repeating the now-fashionable SDGs rhetoric of 'business for peace' and enhanced ideas about the private sector's developmental contributions. For one thing, it is easy to exaggerate the capacity, skill, resources, and incentives for businesses to contribute explicitly to national-level peace consolidation processes, and to have over-optimistic expectations about those contributions. Such expectations assume, among other things, a very unified private sector, whereas there are significant differences in how the conflict has touched (or not touched) different sectors in this economy.

One challenge related to this differential experience seems apparent to me: how, in a country enjoying relative peace and prosperity in the last few years leading up to the peace deal, to sustain business attention to peacebuilding imperatives with long-term transformational dynamics. The economic 'peace dividend' might displace some of the urgency around attempting fundamental changes to the ways in which business here deals with social impact, security and other issues.

Here is a recent paper I did on 'the private sector and inclusive peacebuilding' (see index).

Here are some other posts on this blog on 'business and peace'.

JF