Operationalizing peace through commerce: Toward an empirical approach

Most scholars would agree that the goal of business is to create value. Yet, can there be anything more valuable than peace? This article tackles the following research question: How can, or do, businesses advance peace? It explains why peace through commerce is a topic worthy of study and sets out an empirical approach to operationalize it. The implementation of that approach remains in the future, but in this article, I seek to examine the contours of a possible approach. The proposed study will demonstrate how some businesses have already begun to move toward advancing peace and will give direction for how businesses could follow suit in the future. With both a content analysis and a panel data analysis, there would be data to help determine an index for peace through commerce, which would contribute a great deal to the existing body of literature. The proposed study will help scholars and practitioners alike understand the relationship between business and peace better.