Work package 2
Seven countries where a company promised to fix something.
These are the places where that promise runs into its hardest tests: a peace accord ten years on in Colombia, a currency collapse in Lebanon, an insurgency in northern Mozambique, a full-scale war in Ukraine. Each case follows one European multinational through one of those settings, in sectors that run from brewing and pharmaceuticals to gas, clothing, palm oil and tuna.
- Funder
- Research Council of Norway
- Project number
- 353416
- Scheme
- FRIPRO Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal
- Term
- 1 Jul 2025 to 29 Jun 2029
- Host
- Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE/SUM), University of Oslo
- Lead
- Jason Miklian
Bogotá · Meta · Cauca
A German industrial group bet on rural electrification after the 2016 accord. Then the cities burned.
Colombian firms paid farmers to leave coca and hired ex-combatants. Ten years on we ask whether the peace dividend reached anyone outside the project maps.
Questions: RQ2, RQ4, RQ5, RQ7
Beirut · Tripoli · Bekaa
A French drug company settled a bribery case in 2018. In 2022 it brought in 13,000 cholera vaccines.
Lebanese firms are woven into the parties and sects that govern where the state does not. This case follows what social repair looks like when a company is buying back trust it spent itself.
Questions: RQ2, RQ4, RQ6
Bukavu · Goma · Kisangani
The brewery kept its trucks moving by paying armed groups. Then it wrote a human rights policy.
A Dutch parent company's Congolese subsidiary paid illicit taxes to rebel groups for years. We ask whether the policy that followed changed the conflict footprint or only the reporting.
Questions: RQ4, RQ5, RQ7
Dhaka · Gazipur · Chattogram
Thirteen years after Rana Plaza, the buyer says its own subcontractors undercut the wage it promised.
A Swedish retailer has argued publicly for a living wage inside a sourcing structure that makes the wage unenforceable. The case asks whether one large buyer can move an industry it does not own.
Questions: RQ4, RQ5, RQ6
Cabo Delgado · Palma · Maputo
A twenty billion dollar gas project promised jobs to Cabo Delgado. The insurgency arrived first.
What does an unmet corporate promise cost the people who believed it? Palma is where that question is sharpest, and where a company is managing the fallout of a presence that became part of the conflict.
Questions: RQ4, RQ5, RQ7
Kyiv · Lviv · Dnipro
One company, two sides. Twenty million dollars invested in Ukraine, thirty million paid in Russian tax.
Business ethics scholars once argued that firms present on both sides of a war are the ones best placed to broker peace. Ukraine is where that argument meets a full-scale invasion.
Questions: RQ3, RQ4, RQ5, RQ7
North Sumatra · Riau · Jakarta
Can a plantation ever be responsible? Sumatra is where the EU deforestation rules meet the EU trade deal.
A German discount grocer is among Europe's largest buyers of Sumatran palm oil, on a seam where one EU regime restricts imports and EU trade negotiators work to expand them.
Questions: RQ3, RQ4, RQ7, RQ8
Indonesia · Philippines · Papua New Guinea · Solomon Islands · Malaysia · Timor-Leste
Four tuna species spawn in one sea shared by six countries. Europe buys the catch and sets many of the rules it is caught under.
The Coral Triangle is the nursery of the world's market tuna. This case follows one European buyer through certification, trade concessions and the conditions on the boats.