As governments retreat from peacebuilding, corporate initiatives will be increasingly responsible for avoiding the adverse effects of industry on peace and human rights.
With western governments dramatically cutting budgets for peace, aid, and development, a peacebuilding niche has emerged that could be filled by private companies interested in preserving peace.
Businesses have a stake in safeguarding sustainable peace in the countries and regions in which they operate, said Mike Jobbins, Vice President of Global Affairs and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an international NGO focused on ending violent conflict. “Ultimately, you know, anyone involved in business needs a set of social conditions in which that business can thrive… All key trade stops when war breaks out,” he told Peace News Network (PNN).
A central organization that has emerged with the goal of giving private companies a stake in peacebuilding is the Voluntary Principles Initiative (VPI). Established in 2000, the VPI is a movement that brings together governments, corporations, and NGOs to provide guidance to companies on how to protect human rights in their operations. The organization, Jobbins said, offers a forum to discuss the management of grievances and complaints by local communities, how to engage ethically with military and police forces that provide security around company sites, and issues surrounding technology, surveillance, and data sharing with communities and local law enforcement.
Jobbins said that SFCG, a VPI founding member, is particularly interested in leveraging the movement to engage with two particular types of businesses: The mining and energy sector, and global digital companies. Extractive industries like mining, he said, are dependent on long-term investment and planning, and are thus encouraged to build ongoing relationships with local communities. Meanwhile, social media companies “see the entire world as their customer, and therefore all of the ills of the world sort of show up on the platform,” said Jobbins, pointing to Meta, X, TikTok, and OpenAI as examples. These types of companies, due to their immovable or intangible assets, are often particularly interested in building peace through sustained engagement with fragile societies, he added.
The VPI has not been wholly successful in avoiding harms by its member corporations. Since 1975, the Cerrejón Mine in Colombia’s La Guajira department has been the site of numerous environmental and human rights abuses. Initially owned by ExxonMobil subsidiary INTERCOR and purchased by Glencore between 2021 and 2022, the mine has caused the forced displacement of over 25 Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, according to a report by civil society organizations CENSAT and CINEP. Between 2022 and 2023, the two groups documented 70 human rights violations by the army, police, and unknown assailants against land defenders. Both ExxonMobil and Glencore are VPI corporate members. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Glencore is one of ten mining giants associated with 50 percent of allegations of abuses of environmental, land, Indigenous peoples’ and workers’ rights tracked since 2010. In 2013, Amnesty International withdrew from the VPI, citing its concerns about the organization’s failure to “develop robust accountability systems for member companies.”
Jobbins, who has experience working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for SFCG and the Wilson Center, said that corporate responsibility in peacebuilding is especially important in the country, which has the world’s largest reserves of minerals key to the global transition away from fossil fuels. Extractive industries have often been tied to the DRC’s conflicts, so a special emphasis should be placed, he said, on sustainable development that protects peace and human rights in countries like the DRC.
“There’s a long history of the resources of Congo fueling global prosperity and local suffering. Fueling global societies by undermining Congolese society,” he said. “And so in that context, there’s an opportunity to do better.”
Due to the difficulty of working in a country where mining industries are often involved in human rights abuses, many companies, such as Apple, have instead chosen to withdraw from the DRC entirely. Jobbins said that withdrawal from the DRC’s economy is not a solution, and that responsible presence and reforms represent the best path to peace and prosperity in the DRC and a global fossil fuel-free economy. He said that excluding the country from leading supply chains that connect “some of the poorest people on Earth into the global economy” is not a solution.
A better solution, he said, is for the Congolese government, international governments, and civil society groups “to be able to come together and arrange a new kind of social compact about how investment can undo some of the harms that 100 or more years of exploitative investments have done.”
Nascent efforts to regularize and support artisanal crafters and small-scale miners in the DRC offer a way forward, said Jobbins. He added that corporations and advocacy groups should focus on addressing child labor, illicit taxation, and worker exploitation by increasing oversight over mineral industries. Despite existing criticisms of Glencore, he said that the Anglo-Swiss mining company is making an effort to engage with the Congolese government and local communities to negotiate security and human rights concerns.
Peace and war will always remain a responsibility for governments, he said, and civil society groups also have a role to play in furthering reconciliation in countries affected by civil war like the DRC. Nevertheless, in a world where peacebuilding is no longer a top priority for the great powers, business is likely to increasingly find itself thrust into the role of defending peace.
Keywords: business, peace, peacebuilding, corporate, corporations, DRC, Congo, Glencore, human rights, mining, minerals, conflict, conflict resolution
Pablo Molina Asensi
Pablo Molina Asensi is a Freelancer and Grants Manager for Peace News Network. He earned his M.A. in Global Communication from George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in 2024, concentrating in Conflict and Conflict Resolution. He also graduated from The American University's School of International Service in 2022, with concentrations in Peace, Global Security, and Conflict Resolution in addition to Global Inequality and Development. Pablo is particularly interested in issues of human rights and refugee policy. He has carried out research into the situation of DRC refugees in Uganda and has written extensively about Western Sahara.
