How and why corporate interests contribute to conflict

Abstract

This presentation examines how harmful commodity industries create, sustain and profit from conflict, drawing on examples across industries. First, it explores how corporate interests generate both armed conflict and social conflict in pursuit of profit. Examples include the social media and digital technology corporations (including Facebook and Palantir). Second, it discusses how industries deliberately create conflict within research and policy communities, including the tobacco industry’s ‘Project Sunrise’, and other current examples aimed at dividing researchers and undermining public health advocacy. Third, it discusses how industries profit during periods of uncertainty and instability, with examples from the alcohol, food, social media and fossil fuel sectors. The presentation also addresses how commercial actors fuel wider forms of social conflict within societies by setting communities against one another, including stoking antagonism toward ethnic and religious groups and migrants. It further discusses the so-called ‘culture wars’, often created and sometimes funded by international right-wing political-libertarian movements, and in some cases, commercial actors. Political and commercial actors also work together to shape public discourse, for example through institutional and academic partnerships, with the apparent aim of contributing to the normalisation of anti-regulatory and anti-public health framings. Creating conflict (for example, among public health advocates and researchers) is one strategy within this agenda. Possible solutions will be presented for discussion.