There is a pressing need to understand what constitutes ethical and unethical business conduct in conflict zones, and how business operations impact conflict and peace. For over 20 years, the field of ‘business and peace’ has led this normative debate in management studies, standing as the only dedicated management field that focuses on the topic. Business and peace offers management scholars an array of opportunities to publish in top-tier management journals, but at the same time, the field has several issues that inhibit quality research and dissuade new scholars from making contributions. In response, this article untangles the current issues in the field and then provides the theoretical and conceptual starting points that scholars can use to undertake business and peace research. A detailed research agenda is also provided, which describes the current standpoint of the field surrounding what constitutes ethical and unethical conduct in conflict zones, while illustrating how business and peace can be extended through several parallel management fields. The article encourages the development of high-quality scholarship from business and peace researchers alongside those from mainstream management fields that can advance the normative debate.

Humanitarian relief efforts increasingly depend on corporate philanthropy and corporate donations. In times of war, however, corporate philanthropy is complicated because stakeholders may interpret corporate donations as politically partial. Corporate donations may therefore impact corporations’ relations with warring countries, endanger corporate assets and operations, and affect corporate reputations both positively and negatively. Using a unique dataset of humanitarian pledges by Europe’s 300 largest corporations following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, we examine when corporations give in times of war and why many made humanitarian pledges while others did not. Our fsQCA analysis reveals different pathways to corporate giving in the context of interstate armed conflict and suggests that corporations pledging donations consider social, strategic, and mimetic bandwagon-related factors in conjunction. The findings extend the understanding of corporate philanthropy by revealing how the politicized context of armed conflict complicates motivations for corporate donations and demonstrates how corporations’ economic interests can both enable and hinder corporate philanthropy in times of war.

Democracy and strong institutions characterize the most innovative countries. Even though this proposition has been empirically put to empirical tests and yielded contrasting views, these attempts were limited to technical innovation. This paper aims to fill this gap by extending it to social innovation. Using a typology of institutional change rooted in political science and a large dataset spanning 1800-2018, we tested this hypothesis by applying a Generalized Method of Moment model (GMM). The results indicate that democracy positively affects social innovation, but the effect is not immediate, namely within six years. A robustness check has been conducted to validate our results.

In this study we follow the invitation of scholars from the natural sciences to engage with a mental model of humans beyond the isolated individualistic view of identity and Self. We explore the possibility of leaders taking a mindset based on an inter-connected sense of identiy, aiming to unite rather than polarize when epressing hope. We define the idea of an inter-connected identity by reviewing its conceptual relationship to, and theoretical distinction from, social identity theory and personal, social and superordinate identity dimensions, and build on the concept of identity salience to explore the relevance of inter-connected identity to differences in leader approaches to hope (agency and pathway). In doing so, we discuss novel ways of looking at polarizing versus uniting approaches to hope.

With increasing legislation mandating human rights due diligence (HRDD) practices, corporate respect for human rights has gained more prominence. Conflict-affected areas pose significant risks for Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) to become complicit in human rights violations. However, conflict-sensitive HRDD has hardly been considered in previous business and human rights (BHR) literature. Therefore, this future-oriented study analyzes how MNEs will implement HRDD practices in such challenging conflict-affected areas over the next decade. Thereby, we outline how B4P research can inform the development of conflict-sensitive HRDD practices. In a Delphi study, 82 experts from business, civil society, and academia discussed 13 future scenarios on conflict-sensitive HRDD practices. We show which HRRD practices are most feasible for MNEs, and which create the highest positive impact for rightsholders. Our findings indicate that the decision between exiting conflict-affected areas or staying and implementing “enhanced engagement” strategies presents a business case dilemma to MNEs which has significant ethical impacts for rightsholders impacted by this decision. We contribute to the BHR literature by adding a conflict perspective to the discourse and addressing compliance challenges with existing and prospective HRDD laws.