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Businesses are increasingly engaged in actions to support peace in conflict- and violence-affected communities. Yet there is limited knowledge about why business leaders engage in peace or how citizens perceive the importance, efficacy and impacts of business contributions to address conflict and violence. These gaps are particularly acute for small business scholarship. This paper aims to address these.

This paper considers how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) view their peace-positive actions and how these are perceived by communities. This paper examines this by using two original primary surveys conducted concurrently in May 2021 in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. Question themes included: SMEs operating environments, relationships and networks, experiences of violence, SMEs community contributions and citizen perceptions of businesses as peacebuilding agents.

The results show that small business leaders who supported their communities with peace-positive actions saw their businesses perform better and held positive views of the benefits of engagement. Further, citizen perceptions of businesses contributions to peace declined where insecurity increased and improved where businesses – and in particular MSMSEs – engaged more in their communities.

This paper discusses certain limitations related to the use of a mobile-phone based sampling methodology enumerated during an ongoing pandemic.

This paper presents an original contribution that examines both SME and citizen perceptions of businesses peace-positive actions. The findings inform notions of SME leadership in fragile contexts, as well as the role of the private sector in conflict spaces more generally. They also suggest a greater focus on understanding the broader perceptions of businesses actions toward peacebuilding within society.

This chapter explores collective imageries of the distant future and unpacks how fuzzy frames that anticipate things-to-come lead to variations in “technological solutions” envisioned for the distant future. It suggests that these frames are characterized by the struggle over the construction of different future plots and the proselytization of divergent pathways to the future. Such frames are a product of collective anticipation, which refers to a set of ideas, imageries and beliefs about the future that can be located in the form of structures of knowledge, such as cultural artifacts, scientific products and political frames that shape the thinking of the collective. This chapter posits that the “fuzziness” of our frames anticipating the distant future could be reduced through a selective process where alternatives of the future are winnowed out by processes of selection and exclusion based on faith, values and evidence.