Business and Human Rights Bridging the Governance Gap

This research paper explores some trends and debates related to efforts to identify, promote and regulate the roles, responsibilities and impacts of business enterprises in relation to human rights. The emerging field of business and human rights (BHR), encapsulating these issues, is marked by an overall paradox: clear signs of increasing interest and activity around BHR questions exist alongside considerable uncertainty, apathy or outright lack of awareness concerning many key BHR themes

Promoting conflict-sensitive business activity during peacebuilding

This paper considers aspects of the relationship between policies promoting private sector investment and growth, and policies consolidating peace. It covers post-conflict transitions where external authorities play a major role. A core contemporary peacebuilding policy assumption is that stimulating economic recovery is vital to sustaining political settlements and social cohesion. Yet how do we respond when policies to stimulate investment and imperatives to consolidate peace lead to contradictory choices? The paper considers framing investment-promotion activities as quasi-regulatory in nature, given that external actors are shaping and influencing private sector impacts on peacebuilding. It reflects on ideas of "transitionalism" as a distinctive policy mindset during exceptional recovery periods. It addresses three questions: (1) what is distinctive about transitional approaches to influencing the ways that business actors may impact peacebuilding (compared with "routine" developmental settings)? (2) What is distinctive about promoting conflict-sensitive business activity and investment, and how might this require different priorities? (3) What is the proper balance in transitional policymaking between attracting investment to capital-starved settings, and requiring investment to be responsible? (author's abstract

Navigating the Backlash Against Global Law and Institutions

This article considers the recent ‘Backlash’ against global norms and institutions fuelled by various contemporary political developments within and between states. Understanding the shape, significance and drivers of this phenomenon better is a pre-requisite to developing and analysing possible responses by Australia and other states. The current global legal order was established after World War II and is underpinned by the United Nations Charter, international law in general, and the growing collection of multilateral international legal instruments by which states agree to conduct their international relations. The sweep of the global legal order is broad, encompassing norms and institutions that seek to foster international cooperation across a range of spheres, including development, the environment, finance, health, human rights, science, security and trade. The United States has historically been considered the leader and guarantor of the post-1945 legal order, playing host to its most important institutions. The US has provided key economic, political, and diplomatic backing throughout its time as one of two superpowers during the Cold War, and as the hegemonic power for most of the period since. Australia has also been a strong supporter of the liberal rules-based order, commitment to which explicitly underpins its current official foreign policy posture.1 It was a founding member of the United Nations and has traditionally been involved in the drafting of, and been swift to sign on to, new international covenants that clarify and crystalise the heretofore expanding reach of international law

Navigating the Backlash against Global Law and Institutions

This article considers the recent ‘Backlash’ against global norms and institutions fuelled by various contemporary political developments within and between states. Understanding the shape, significance and drivers of this phenomenon better is a pre-requisite to developing and analysing possible responses by Australia and other states. The current global legal order was established after World War II and is underpinned by the United Nations Charter, international law in general, and the growing collection of multilateral international legal instruments by which states agree to conduct their international relations. The sweep of the global legal order is broad, encompassing norms and institutions that seek to foster international cooperation across a range of spheres, including development, the environment, finance, health, human rights, science, security and trade. The United States has historically been considered the leader and guarantor of the post-1945 legal order, playing host to its most important institutions. The US has provided key economic, political, and diplomatic backing throughout its time as one of two superpowers during the Cold War, and as the hegemonic power for most of the period since. Australia has also been a strong supporter of the liberal rules-based order, commitment to which explicitly underpins its current official foreign policy posture.1 It was a founding member of the United Nations and has traditionally been involved in the drafting of, and been swift to sign on to, new international covenants that clarify and crystalise the heretofore expanding reach of international law

Marketing as a means to transformative social conflict resolution: lessons from transitioning war economies and the Colombian coffee marketing system

Social conflicts are ubiquitous to the human condition and occur throughout markets, marketing processes, and marketing systems.When unchecked or unmitigated, social conflict can have devastating consequences for consumers, marketers, and societies, especially when conflict escalates to war. In this article, the authors offer a systemic analysis of the Colombian war economy, with its conflicted shadow and coping markets, to show how a growing network of fair-trade coffee actors has played a key role in transitioning the country’s war economy into a peace economy. They particularly draw attention to the sources of conflict in this market and highlight four transition mechanisms — i.e., empowerment, communication, community building and regulation — through which marketers can contribute to peacemaking and thus produce mutually beneficial outcomes for consumers and society. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for marketing theory, practice, and public policy