Maria Teresa Uribe Jaramillo, PhD candidate at KEDGE, recognised for her article “Business, conflict, and peace: a systematic literature review and conceptual framework”
From 4th to 6th April 2025, Maastricht hosted the 36th annual conference of the International Association for Business and Society (IABS) on the theme “Redesigning Business for the Common Good”.
On this occasion, Maria Teresa Uribe Jaramillo received the Outstanding Published Article Award for her paper “Business, conflict, and peace: a systematic literature review and conceptual framework”, published in the Journal of Management Studies.
She shares this award with her co-authors.
- Jay Joseph (American University of Beirut)
- François Maon (IESEG School of Management)
- John E. Katsos (American University of Sharjah and Queen’s University Belfast)
- Adam Lindgreen (Copenhagen Business School and University of Pretoria)
This award reflects the increasing relevance of business and peace research within management and organization studies. It is an encouragement to the communities of practitioners, organizations, scholars, and research institutions dedicated to collectively addressing key challenges of business operating in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. More interdisciplinary research is needed and must move beyond to ask hard questions about business practices and (non)commitments.
There is growing recognition that business activity can promote peacebuilding, yet contradictory claims have emerged about company roles in peace and conflict. The research field of business and peace has focused on this issue, as have scholars in related fields like political science, economics, law, and ethics. This has led to definitional variations, alongside unit and level of analysis differences, which generate contradictory claims that hamper future research on this critical topic. To reconcile extant research around companies and their place in peacebuilding scholarship, this study undertakes an organizational-level examination of the field, cataloguing the research by scholars across disciplines through a systematic review of 215 publications. The review maps the known ways by which businesses can engage in peacebuilding, while demonstrating how organizations exercise their agency to create heterogeneous effects on peace and conflict. The analysis highlights the need for businesses to advance peace-positive ends across a range of activities to reduce the conflict-causing effects of business. By showing that businesses, intentionally or not, create peace or conflict through their activities, this article issues a call to action for scholars and decision makers to advance knowledge concerning peacebuilding organizations.
Additional information about the paper: The authors identify five key domains through which businesses shape peace and conflict:
- Institutions – influencing the rule of law, transparency, and the legitimacy of governance.
- Markets – shaping economic inclusion, environmental sustainability, and informal economies.
- Communities – redistributing resources, building partnerships, and enabling resilience in fragile contexts.
- Operations – through decisions on supply chains, governance, risk, and exit strategies.
- Employees – by providing decent work, ensuring representation, and managing workplace dynamics sensitively.
Key Takeaway: Business is neither inherently good nor bad for peace—it depends on the actions they take and the impacts they create. A true peace-positive organization must address both its contributions to peace and its potential for causing conflict.
See the article in open access through this link
See the Journal of Management Studies blog on the paper here
About Maria Teresa
she is a Colombian third-year PhD candidate and research assistant at KEDGE in the Department of Strategy and Centre of Excellence for Sustainability. She is developing a thesis focused on organizational frameworks for peacebuilding in conflict settings, under the supervision of Natalia Yakovleva and Julien Hanoteau from KEDGE Business School, and Jay Joseph from American University of Beirut. Her research interests and expertise encompass sustainability management through areas such as business and peace, governance, and corporate social responsibility.
