PRACTICING BUSINESS AND PEACE? Considerations overheard in the field

This chapter argues that much of the current discussion about the business role in peace appears to be uninformed by the experiences of corporate practitioners and does not speak in any obvious way to the dilemmas and challenges of ‘frontline’ company staff. Based significantly on the authors’ professional experience working with extractive industries companies in the field, this chapter explores the experiences of companies operating in contexts of fragility to illustrate the need for a more complete view of business activities in such contexts. In particular, in contexts of conflict and fragility, companies consistently find it difficult to avoid getting entangled in conflicts, and the prospect of such entanglement remains a major preoccupation of company staff. We argue that the inclusion of considerations of corporate impacts on conflict will make discourses about business and peace more practically useful to companies at the operational level.