Peace through Commerce: Responsible Corporate Citizenship and the Ideals of the United Nations Global Compact

The Role of Corporate Actors in Peace- Building Processes

C H A P T E R 4 The Role of Corporate Actors in Peace-Building Processes Opportunities and Challenges John Paul Lederach INTRODUCTION Within the field of peace building I work in the tradition of a practitioner-scholar. I have spent more time in the field than the classroom, working with peace initiatives and people in settings of deep-rooted conflict. Three recent experiences from my work in the field speak to the challenges of commerce and peace building at both the macro and micro levels. Several years ago I remember sitting with a number of grassroots leaders in Myanmar. While our wider focus was the question of how to approach the challenges of peace in this ultra-controlled setting , the immediate discussions swirled around recent sanctions and boycotts placed on the import of fabrics produced in Myanmar by a number of countries in the international community. Many in our group had extended family members affected by the resulting layoffs. Within weeks of the international community’s actions, producer factories moved from Myanmar to China and neighboring countries; at the same time, China made several transfers of money to the military Junta. The net result, as expressed by some in the group, was a sharp rise in unemployment in the fabric sector and no noticeable effect on the government. As noted by Seagrave in Lords of the Rim, Chinese and diaspora-based Chinese capital moves with extraordinary ease and fluidity throughout Southeast Asia.1 Practi96 The Role of Corporate Actors in Peace-Building Processes 97 cal capacities to mobilize the connections between peace and commerce rarely move with the same ease. In Nepal, where civil war has been raging for nearly a decade and is now on the cusp of a major positive transformation, intriguing examples exist of innovation in the commerce sector in the midst of war. As a notable example, there is the Three Sisters Trekking Agency—a trekking company for women operated by women—formed in the years just prior to the war. They made a serious organizational commitment to employ women and to do so across caste groups, including the most marginal and excluded groups in rural areas. Thirty staff were hired and trained. The women worked and ate together. Developing their primary excursions from Pokhara, a major tourist area in Nepal that experienced a significant decline in tourism during the war, this company, unlike others, prospered . Interestingly, they undercut the Maoist revolutionary taxes, though they have no ideological or direct connection with them. Their strong sense of social justice and equality, focus on marginalized women, and inclusion of low castes served as a kind of vaccination against the demands of the Maoists, with whom they stood fast on principle, refusing to pay revolutionary taxes. Three Sisters Trekking was the only trekking agency not forced to comply with the revolutionary tax, and it was one of the few companies that has grown in size and extended its area of operations throughout the past eight years.2 At a training program on peace building for Catholic bishops held in San Diego in 2005, a case study emerged in our discussion about the dif- ficulties of local conflict, the extractive industries, and globalization. In Peru a mining company based in the United States had contracts with the Peruvian government to pursue extraction of minerals. The effects of this arrangement were twofold: an increased level of employment and a sharp rise in environmental degradation and pollution. The Catholic bishop in the area began to pursue the issue of environmental impact and corporate responsibility. He found significant resistance and opposition from influential locals and those employed by the corporation because they feared losing their jobs. His strategy, as he described it, took him to Detroit and Boston, where he formed alliances with scientists who helped provide environmental assessments. Yet he increasingly experienced tension and pressure from people within his own diocese associated with the company and the government. Ironically, his efforts were received more favorably in Boston than locally. 98 John Paul Lederach These examples point toward the complexity of the issues faced when commerce and peace building are linked from the standpoint of on-theground challenges and impacts. I believe they set the stage for identifying important opportunities for and difficulties of this very necessary but much underdeveloped aspect of peace building. For the purposes of this chapter, and for...