Business Goes to War

Liali Jera’i
Business and human rights
Response -1- week 5: business goes to war
Fall 2012
Morality of privatized wars
We are living in a world with rapid expansion of globalization, free market systems and privatization. Everything has advantages and disadvantages that may bring benefit and boom or harm and loss respectively. Due to the rise in the activities from corporations operating in their parent countries and abroad, a number of intense and severe negative externalities arose in last decade.   These externalities hit different aspects in the society, violations of international and legal documents concerning human rights, the environment and labor, to name a few.
The most damaging issues occur when businesses operate in an unstable country where there are adverse human rights abuses and a lack of legislative and national laws to prevent such abuses. Most companies, especially private military and security companies, normally operate in situations of armed conflict. The rise of the aggressive attitude of these companies drew the attention of the international and local community to such harmful acts. The international community, civil society, governments, and non-governmental organizations became aware of the side effects of these corporations, and thus they started adopting and creating approaches and solutions to mitigate and prevent further violations committed by the MNCs. Such efforts include: The Montreux Document, International Code of Conduct, IHL…etc. The aim of these documents is to increase and ensure corporations attention to human rights responsibilities when operating in conflict zones. In this paper I’ll be discussing cases like Caterpillar and the selling of Bulldozers to Israel, and PMSCs like Blackwater, KBR, and Halliburton that operated during the war on Iraq in 2003.

The misuse of equipments and products bought from well-known MNCs, especially when they create adverse human rights abuses, will absolutely focus the light on...