"Introduction: building business, breaking peace? Myanmar’s economic opening and transition to democracy has given businesses significant opportunities to expand in a high-growth but problematic emerging market. Foreign direct investment has grown 10-fold since 20111 across all sectors of the Myanmar economy. But Myanmar also ranks in the bottom 5 per cent of 189 countries surveyed by the World Bank for ease of doing business,2 permeated by endemic corruption at the individual, institutional and political levels.3 The United Nations Development Programme lumps these issues under the umbrella of ‘business rights’, including contractual certainty, financial fairness and freedom from corruption and extortion,4 together considered as the building blocks for successful business development. While opening brought optimism that trade and growth would lift Myanmar’s poorest, these gains have primarily benefited existing local elites as most new investments require local partners who hold high-level roles in Myanmar’s political– military nexus. Moreover, Myanmar’s military undertook an ethnic cleansing of 2 million Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state – just the type of authoritarian action that economic opening was promised to temper. Today, some 700,000 Rohingya are refugees in neighbouring India and Bangladesh, with a further 100,000 in internally displaced persons camps.5 While many international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) have condemned the violent cleansing, no businesses operating in Myanmar have spoken out against it as of February 2017, and none have withdrawn their government partnerships or left the country. This silence comes as many companies have explicitly framed their entry (or re-entry) into the Myanmar market as action to help solidify peace in one of the world’s least developed states, promoting their roles as agents of peace and sustainable socio-economic development. Myanmar’s society remains a patchwork of ethnic groups, regional fighting and power struggles that often pre-date military rule. While growth grows the pie (and spoils of peace), unevenness of this distribution has exacerbated societal cleavages. There are 135 ethnic minorities in Myanmar and 18 conflict groups that base their allegiance and fight upon the stated basis of grievances resulting from social, political and economic deprivation.6 These conflicts tend to be based in the country’s border areas, where employment opportunities, infrastructure and state capacity are limited, and the likelihood of abuses by official forces is high. Nearly all of these conflicts are rooted in the uneven division of economic opportunities and civil rights in Myanmar, along with the heavy-handed rule used to maintain it. Layered within these historically repressive tactics is state-supported ethnic conflict. These issues have manifested in Rakhine state between Buddhist majority ‘ethnic Rakhines’ and a Muslim Rohingya minority. The Rohingya are called ‘Bengali Muslims’ by most in Myanmar, due to their migration from what is now Bangladesh beginning in the late 1700s, and as an indicator of the desire to designate Rohingyas as outsiders.7 This is the government’s third major cleansing attempt of Rohingya, following similar efforts in 1978 and 1991.8 Many have used the new liberalised media landscape to promote divisive ethnic speech, most visibly Buddhist nationalists Ashin Wirathu and Ma Ba Tha.9 These overtures culminated in a series of ‘Protection of Race and Religion’ laws that designated Myanmar as a Buddhist state and legalised antiRohingya discrimination.10 Criticised by the UN, INGOs and some domestic NGOs, the bills were nevertheless passed throughout 2014 and 2015. To understand why economic opening and rapid development has failed to bring an inclusive peace to Myanmar, we compare Myanmar’s imperfect opening to existing assumptions on how businesses can and should operate in fragile states. The literature has been proliferating rapidly with theories about how, where and why businesses can contribute to peace-building.11 The business community has also been urged to be more involved in post-conflict peace-building processes,12 through the Responsibility To Protect, UN Sustainable Development Goals, Business and Human Rights Guiding Principles, United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and similar multilateral initiatives. But the empirical evidence that can support and refine such pushes remains wanting. We have gaps in understanding national-level variations in motivations behind business engagement in peace, how international business-peace agendas influence local business communities, which local business agents are the most effective for peace and development, how competition from firms based in countries with more illiberal predispositions influences ethical business decision-making and where peace-building business activities have worsened local ethnic conflict instead of alleviating it. This article explores new avenues for theory on these issues through analysis of national business engagement in peace and development in Myanmar after the country’s 2011 economic opening, emphasising business owners in conflict-affected Rakhine state. This article presents three primary findings about business actions in Myanmar..."