Session 1 Slim - Business Actors in Armed Conflicts

<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