title: Big Business and Grand Challenges: How Multinationals Can Contribute to Peace
Creators: name: Madibekova, Diana
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2024

description: The business for peace scholarship has interdisciplinary roots – from peace and conflict studies, international law, and political science – and maintains that businesses decrease the likelihood for war (negative peace) and contribute to societal harmony and development (positive peace). On the one hand, the field supports this through generalist theory that prioritizes businesses’ role in economic growth and trade. On the other hand, it is host to many disparate observations on how businesses can have piecemeal peace impacts, including conducting track-two diplomacy, multinationals (MNEs) employing local workers instead of relying on expatriates, et cetera. Where the first type of theory is too broad to inform concrete peace-enhancing practices for businesses and policy makers, the second has led to unconnected micro-theoretical insights that are also specific to their particular contexts – generated mainly in post-conflict and active war contexts – thereby limiting their usefulness. This thesis adopts a complementary management perspective, moving the field away from both generalist and micro-theoretical approaches towards mid-range theory that can more adequately inspire businesses to contribute to peace, and policy makers to effectively facilitate this. To do so, peace is conceptualised as a grand challenge and placed in its framework, where business can contribute to or jeopardise peace, sourced from the homonymous literature. The application of this framework to the study of peace is developed in the literature review chapter, which first unpacks the rich interdisciplinary roots of the field, the state-of-the-art of the research, and its caveats and limitations. The subsequent empirical chapter applies this framework to how MNEs in Türkiye perceive peace and their peace contributions. This previously unstudied setting is highly relevant, as Türkiye is located between Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, is proximate to countries in war, and is a rising peacebuilding actor in international relations. Under Türkiye’s distinctive unique conditions, MNEs can be expected to be sensitive to how they affect peace, whilst having the stability to consciously construct it. Specifically, this thesis demonstrates that whilst negative peace primarily remains under the purview of government, positive peace can and is indeed impacted by MNEs. A flexible pattern matching analysis of 33 expert elite interviews and secondary data identifies that business can contribute to peace through its multilevel daily actions: individual (leadership), organisational (human resource management, corporate political activity, and philanthropy), and multilateral (partnerships with other businesses, universities, and the United Nations). Moreover, this study found that the industry sector of the business to be an important consideration. These insights have important implications for future research whilst simultaneously being highly relevant for policymakers and multinationals and makes a case for a more structured and balanced MNE approach to what may arguably be the grandest challenge of our time: peace.