Conflict zones: New frontiers and ethical imaginations

Increasingly, multinational companies are extending their operations to countries experiencing violent conflict. Prevailing business norms—including those related to ethics—may not provide adequate guidance in these novel environments. The impact of private economic activity in conflict zones has garnered practitioner and academic attention. Practitioners’ focus on business and peace has grown, with public and private sector actors like the United Nations, Unilever, Pearson, Barrick Gold, and G4S getting involved. The academic focus on business and peace has largely focused on how and why businesses can make societies more peaceful or on the relatively narrow questions of business impact on human rights. What has received comparatively little attention, however, is the core normative question: What are the ethical obligations of private economic actors in conflict zones? This article is an initial effort to answer this question. We argue that the three major business ethics frameworks used today [i.e., (1) shareholder, (2) stakeholder, and (3) integrated social contracts (ISCT) theories] require peace promotion as an underlying requirement for multinational businesses operating in conflict zones. After a brief overview of business and peace and business ethics theories, we show that the prevailing business ethics theories are inadequate or self-defeating when applied in conflict zones without reference to peace promotion. Once peace promotion is added as an assumption or obligation, the theories regain plausibility and internal consistency.