Business and Peace in Post-Coup Myanmar: Limitations and Opportunities

Business can have a key role to play in staving off, minimizing the effects of, and resolving conflicts. It can also make conflicts worse. Business for peace scholarship seeks to identify those activities, structures, and opportunities for the private sector to have positive influences on conflict and violence in society and to provide warnings for how business can make conflicts worse. Two research gaps have been identified by scholars in this field: On the one hand, there is a lack of evidence on the impact of business in general in active, high-intensity conflict zones. On the other hand, there is a dearth of evidence on the impact of small and medium enterprises in conflict contexts. This paper addresses these literature gaps. We use the unique setting of post-coup Myanmar to examine the complex interlinkages between small and medium enterprises and an active, high-intensity violent conflict. In the paper, we investigate the combination of economic rationality and civic duty that contributes to building peace and democracy when there is a lack of a functioning government and a collapse of the rule of law.