Abstract:
This article studies the role of business in achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16) - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions - to explore the processes and practices of peacebuilding and the impact on achieving the targets of SDG 16. In particular, we study an extreme context of post-conflict entrepreneurship. We study entrepreneurial ventures where ex-combatants seek to create economic opportunities and challenge the status quo of poverty and inequality in their rural communities. We develop several qualitative case studies of ex-combatant entrepreneurship to identify the activities that enable them to promote and consolidate peace while managing their businesses. We find that these ex-combatant ventures contribute to SDG 16 and identify a matrix of stakeholder engagement for organizing the variety of multi-stakeholder arrangements required of both venture success and peacebuilding efforts.
