Can the private sector be a force for peace, and under what conditions? Unlocking the Peace Premium, a report published by LSE IDEAS, the School's foreign policy think tank, and written by Jason Miklian, Mark van Dorp and John Katsos, tackles the question with unusual rigour. Commissioned by Interpeace's Finance for Peace initiative, it was designed to provide a conceptual and evidentiary basis for how businesses can better contribute to peace outcomes in fragile settings.
Reviewing the evidence, the authors find that companies have made positive contributions across three domains: safety and security, social peace and political peace. But the report's central caution is that these positive impacts are conditional rather than guaranteed. The same investment that stabilises one community can entrench grievances in another, depending on how firms engage with local actors, distribute benefits and navigate conflict dynamics.
The report's distinctive contribution is a mapping of the causal pathways through which private sector activity affects peace, intended to serve as an empirical foundation for the emerging field of peace finance, which seeks to structure investment in fragile and conflict-affected regions so that it supports rather than undermines stability. For scholars of political economy and development, it offers a framework connecting firm-level decisions to macro-level conflict outcomes.