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A Fragile World & Inevitable Conflict - Sam Jones Has Seen The Unimaginable & Wants Us To Act Before We Do Too
Sam Jones is today’s guest, he’s the President and Co-founder of the Heartland Initiative and was recently in town from Atlanta in the US. His work at Heartland Initiative focuses on helping investors understand and address human rights issues and related risks within their investment portfolios. He develops methods, tools, and guidance to assist investors in preventing and reducing harm to human rights through their investments.
Sam has over 25 years of experience in areas like Conflict-sensitive research, analysis, and program management, International humanitarian and human rights law and Working with multiple groups on these issues. In a world seemingly in perpetual states of skirmish through to outright war, what this means for organisations with globalised supply and financial value chains, this matters and can very quickly become a problem of material consequence. Yet how businesses think about geopolitical risk and conflict has a long way to go in maturation. Sam is one of the world’s foremost experts on how adverse human rights impacts converge with conflict and present risks to businesses.
Before co-founding Heartland Initiative, Sam worked at The Carter Centre where he managed programs in the Middle East and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a focus on corporate responsibility for human rights harms. Earlier, Sam cut his teeth as a regional representative for Asia at Counterpart International, where he managed humanitarian and development programs in Iraq and Jordan and led assessment missions to places like the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
His career to date and the set of experiences he has accrued are remarkable and rare. This conversation was an eye opener for me and where we explored conflict zones, assessing human rights risks and harms, the role of investors and corporate actors in respecting the human rights of people right around the globe, how heightened conflict, record levels of migration, weakening international institutions, the climate crisis and profoundly powerful technologies are converging to re-shape the lives and safety of billions of people globally. We cover a lot of territory here. This is a masterclass from Sam whose expertise and relatability are a rare combination to learn from. His experiences in conflict zones is unlike anything I’ve heard before, including his five years in Iraq from 2003 to 2008.
Get out your note book or app and get ready for insights and lessons galore. Sam’s work offers a way for all of us to understand the world a little better, to appreciate how megatrends affect real people and what we can do as employees in organisations to protect, respect and remediate human rights right around the world.
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