<p>Business actors
in armed conflict:
towards a new
humanitarian agenda
Hugo Slim
Dr Hugo Slim is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford
Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of
Oxford, and has advised several companies on human rights
and conflict resolution including Rio Tinto, G4S, and BP.
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to give an overview of current understandings of the
various roles of business actors in armed conflict. It traces the expanding discussion
of business and conflict in today’s civil wars, and the discussion’s importance to
humanitarian, human rights, corporate and peacebuilding policymakers. It shows
how the humanitarian understanding of business roles in conflict has progressed
beyond some simple and largely negative stereotypes about business in war to become
more sophisticated. The article then looks at the significant diversity of business
actors, which can determine their experience of armed conflict. It is suggested that
there are six potential roles of business in armed conflict – that of victim, perpetrator,
supplier, humanitarian actor, peacebuilder, and conflict preventer. Finally, the article
recommends a range of ways to improve humanitarian policy so that humanitarian
actors engage with business more actively and appropriately on law, business relief,
and business continuity.
Keywords: business, armed conflict, humanitarian action, peacebuilding, business relief,
business continuity.
Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, is naturally remembered as a great
humanitarian. His personal humanitarian action at the Battle of Solferino and his
subsequent epiphany about the need for a new international organization is now
Volume 94 Number 887 Autumn 2012
doi:10.1017/S181638311300009X
903
firmly embedded in the founding history of modern humanitarianism.1 But Dunant
did not go to Solferino deliberately to start a global humanitarian organization. In
fact, he was in Solferino on business. He was urgently, perhaps desperately, seeking a
meeting with Napoleon III t