Business and International Crimes
Karen Ballentine
August 29, 1961 - July 23, 2010
On the Wednesday before Karen Ballentine died after a brave struggle against cancer, President Obama signed into law his financial reform bill. Karen would have been happy to know that buried somewhere in its more than 2000 pages are provisions aimed at ensuring companies registered in the US would have to report on minerals they purchase from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the site of one of the most brutal wars of the past two decades. Karen would have been even happier to hear Global Witness, a London-based NGO, announce a few days later that it was suing the U.K. government for failing to list companies it knows are sourcing minerals in violation of UN sanctions on minerals from the DRC. And she would have had merciless fun with the idea that Naomi Campbell had to testify about conflict diamonds in a courtroom in The Hague.
Picture, rigth:Karen with Salil Tripathi, Business and Human Rights Institute, at a meeting on the Red Flags initiative, Zurich, April 2009. (photo Mark Taylor)
Karen worked for neither the Obama administration, nor Global Witness, nor the increasing number of organizations trying to stop the trade in conflict commodities. But all of these are recent examples of a much wider field of policy and advocacy that Karen helped create.
Karen was a pioneer. Her books – The Political Economy of Armed Conflict, co-edited with Jake Sherman, and Profiting from Peace: Managing the Resource Dimensions of Civil War, co-edited with Heiko Nitzschke – remain important contributions to the scholarly debates around how to respond to the political-economy of contemporary civil wars. In those debates, Karen staked out a position alongside those who argued that, regardless of their causes, wars are and always have been sustained and shaped in part by commerce.
But Karen’s principle concern was always with policy. Karen was a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued realist whose cynicism about the powers-that-be was matched by a desire for change. The fact that the fairly obvious commercial activities that help sustain contemporary wars remain largely unregulated – that we know about the problem, yet do nothing about it – was not something Karen could let lie in a policy paper. It seemed obvious to her that if the UN and its member states are serious about managing, preventing and resolving conflicts, then they should get serious about shutting down the economic relations that finance them. Someone was going to have to push them to get serious. For a time, Karen saw it as her role to do so.
Few of us who have worked on international issues can claim to have successfully bridged the divide between research, advocacy and policy entrepreneurism. Karen did. Her written work contributed to our understanding of the political-economy of contemporary wars and to translating that understanding into a language that policy makers could understand. But, for those who worked with Karen, her written work, while important, will always be eclipsed by her activism: the projects, meetings, networking, strategy sessions, discussions and debates, in which Karen was at times a leader and always an active participant. These, it seems to me, were her real contribution.
Karen’s work influenced directly the development of law and policy concerning conflict commodities, UN Sanctions, and above all corporate accountability for international crimes. In so doing, Karen succeeded in helping to lay the foundations for an emerging framework for dealing with the economic agenda’s that help sustain wars. In a life that was far too short, she actually did something. I am proud to have known her.
Mark Taylor
For other memories of Karen, see
The International Peace Institute web site
One can write a message of condolence to her family
or on Karen's facebook page