Daring to Dream? The Realities and Risks for Adolescent Girls Living in Fragile and Conflict Affected Areas
The toxic mix of conflict and violence, poverty, limited access to education and gender inequality leaves girls and young women at high risk of exploitation. Traffickers cash-in on girls’ dreams by promising well-paid jobs and an escape from poverty and crisis, but in reality it’s a path to exploitation. As Plan International UK we have […]
Romero: The Ambivalence of the Sacred
The business people saw a real possibility for their sector to positively impact peace through economic development and the capability of crossing boundaries to get people to work together. However, many (most) of them reacted with a degree of horror that the folks from religion would be there: “They’re the ones that cause intolerance, torture […]
As One: A Different Chapter in Table Tennis Diplomacy
In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon accepted an invitation from China to send an American table tennis team to play some exhibition matches. Several incidents encouraging the interaction between the countries and their teams had occurred prior to 1972, including in 1971 when a U.S. player, who missed the team bus, rode the Chinese bus. […]
Business Fights Poverty Oxford 2019 Connection Zone Lunch: Transcending Conflict to Fight Poverty
“Seventy-three percent of people in the societies of the bottom billion have recently been through a civil war or are still in one,” said Professor Collier in The Bottom Billion. Conflict is “pretty distinctive,” he says, to the poorest countries on the planet. In these countries conflict tends to be a pattern, often prolonged. In […]
Sweet Dreams: Sweet Story
Readers of Business Fights Poverty have been exposed to the arguments for how business might contribute to peace. They have also seen examples of how music can do the same. Many studies have shown corollaries of how gender equity promotes peace. If you want a film that shows all three of these factors in action, […]
Business Fights Poverty At the Movies
Over the last twenty years, my research has focused on the ways in which business can foster peace. This work isn’t really about how trade and economic development can foster peace, but how the actions of the structures that implement trade and economic development – businesses – can do so. In addition to writing four […]
International Retail Therapy Creates New Jobs
“Bpeace is aiming to prevent poverty and violence and that is what I’m trying to do, too.” Martha Estrada knew she had a solid business, but she needed advice. Enter Nat Love, an experienced retail executive from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who was looking for a meaningful mentorship experience. He was introduced to Bpeace through his […]
Cultural Forces, Business and Peace: An Overview
It is true that governments sign treaties with one another or with groups within their jurisdiction to stop violence. A signal feature of government is control over weapons just as a responsibility of government is the security of its people. Determining when to use those weapons and when to stop and for what reasons is […]
Music, Business and Peace: An Overview
Welcome to an ongoing discussion about topics specifically devoted to the relationship among music, business and peace, which will be featured in Business Fights Poverty for the months of June, July, and September. This conversation has been the aim of two conferences on “Music, Business, and Peace” at Indiana University led by scholars at the […]
Interview with Alexander Bernstein: Leonard Bernstein’s Revolution
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein’s role as a larger-than–life figure is well-documented, especially in this year of celebration for the one hundred-year anniversary of his birth. Questions remain as to what one can learn from his music, […]
Interview with Jerry White, CEO of Global Impact Strategies, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia
Jerry is the CEO of Global Impact Strategies, Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia, and co-chair of Global Covenant Partners. Jerry is known for leading high-impact campaigns including the historic International Campaign to Ban Landmines which was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1997. He also co-founded Survivor Corps, formerly […]
Connecting Music to Ethics
Many features of music contribute to its positive potential for promoting social harmony. But music’s influence on human interaction is not entirely benign. I consider features of music that enable it to serve such contrary projects. I begin by itemizing some of the mechanisms through which music creates feeling of solidarity among people. Among them […]
From Settler Colonialism to Standing Rock: Hearing Native Voices for Peace
The water protectors of the Standing Rock Sioux captured public attention with their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Their actions are only the most recent in a long history of indigenous protests of resource extraction and treaty violations on Native American land. Often these struggles have involved indigenous music and Standing Rock was no exception. An […]
Empathy: A Global Imperative for Peace
This essay maintains that interplays between empathy, goodwill and other-regarding behaviors can make a huge difference in arguing one type of community into existence (one based on inclusivity, peace, respect, and universal human values) as opposed to arguing another kind of community into existence (one based on turmoil, meanness, wretchedness, genocide, and heaps of trouble). […]
How Music May Serve as a Nudge for More Ethical and Peaceful Business Behavior
Olivier Urbain’s presence in the special issue features as part of the Business Fights Poverty Challenge on Business, Music and Peace, and in the conferences that we held on topic is inspiring and validating. To have someone of Urbain’s stature willing to take time, not only for an appearance for a conference, but to engage […]
Working Together to Enhance the Effectiveness of Musicking in Peacebuilding Activities
Introduction Do you like music? What kind of music do you like? Have you ever wondered how much musical energy is produced on the planet at any given moment? Hundreds of millions of people are participating in musical events today, singing, playing, performing, dancing, clapping hands, stomping feet, listening with headphones while reading or walking […]
Helping Refugees Move From Crisis To Resilience and Self-Reliance
It is estimated that, on average, a refugee spends over a decade in exile. This means that many refugee children, who make up more than half the world’s refugees, will spend most of their childhood in exile, jeopardizing their education and access to future economic opportunities. For millions of refugee adults, decades of displacement have […]
The Impact of a Microfinance on Preventing Intimate Partner Violence
Indashyikirwa, meaning ‘agents for change’, is a program that seeks to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) across Rwanda, and is being implemented by CARE Rwanda, Rwanda Women’s Network (RWN) and Rwanda Men’s Resource Center (RWAMREC). One component of the program was a 5-month weekly curriculum with 840 heterosexual couples recruited from CARE’s micro-finance village savings […]
The Transition from Aid: Are Businesses Up To The Challenge?
The fabric that makes up international development has many threads, each making a vital contribution. Fortunately the edges around the boxes of ‘who does what’ are more blurred than they were even a decade ago when the transfer of financial resources and expertise usually flowed from ‘North’ to ‘South’. Further blurring of roles is occurring […]
Supporting Entrepreneurs in the Pursuit of Peace
As a marketing executive, New York advertising executive Sabrina Prince has launched many brands. And after 15 years in the field she was looking to contribute her expertise to the global good. A Google search for “entrepreneur, peace, volunteer, women,” brought Sabrina to Bpeace, a nonprofit that matches business experts with entrepreneurs in challenged economies […]