Corporate Security Responsibility: Towards a Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Research Agenda

The political debate about the role of business in armed conflicts has increasingly raised expectations as to governance contributions by private corporations in the fields of conflict prevention, peace-keeping and postconflict peace-building. This political agenda seems far ahead of the research agenda, in which the negative image of business in conflicts, seen as fuelling, prolonging and taking commercial advantage of violent conflicts,still prevails. So far the scientific community has been reluctant to extend the scope of research on ‘corporate social responsibility’ to the area of security in general and to intra-state armed conflicts in particular. As a consequence, there is no basis from which systematic knowledge can be generated about the conditions and the extent to which private corporations can fulfil the role expected of them in the political discourse. The research on positive contributions of private corporations to security amounts to unconnected in-depth case studies of specific corporations in specific conflict settings. Given this state of research, we develop a framework for a comparative research agenda to address the question: Under which circumstances and to what extent can private corporations be expected to contribute to public security

"We have no voice for that" : Land Rights, Power, and Gender in Rural Sierra Leone

Acknowledgements I wish to thank the participants in the Gender and Land Governance Conference at Utrecht University in January 2013 for helpful comments and suggestions. Funding I would like to thank the Faculty of Management at Radboud University Nijmegen for funding the six months of fieldwork on which this article is based.Peer reviewedPostprin

Use of 5-α-Reductase Inhibitors for Prostate Cancer Chemoprevention: American Society of Clinical Oncology/American Urological Association 2008 Clinical Practice Guideline

To develop an evidence-based guideline on the use of 5-α-reductase inhibitors (5-ARIs) for prostate cancer chemoprevention

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

Peacebuilding through Global Peace and Justice

International peacebuilding since the early 1990s faces a dual challenge: how to make sense of the many fragmented (and often contradictory) goals that are now part of international peacebuilding, and how to contribute meaningfully to shaping the re-energized peacebuilding agenda. Necla Tschirgi proposes that the current focus on peacebuilding in conflict-prone or post-conflict countries is a necessary but ultimately insufficient approach in an international system that is deeply divided and increasingly militarized. She argues that it is imperative to take advantage of the renewed interest in peacebuilding to call for international policies and institutions based on peace, social justice and collective security rather than narrowly cast strategies of stabilization, containment and military interventions in ‘zones of conflict’. Peacebuilding is a powerful agenda through which deep-seated inequities and vulnerabilities at both the national and international levels can be underscored and addressed. Development (2005) 48, 50–56. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100163