Introduction

Business and Human Rights (BHR) scholarship has increasingly focused on conflict-affected and high-risk areas (CAHRAs). In this context, scholars and practitioners emphasize  heightened human rights due diligence (hHRDD) , a more intensive process for identifying and addressing human rights risks in such environments, and stakeholder engagement – a strategic process focused on identifying, engaging and collaborating with affected individuals. Stakeholder engagement is an ongoing relational process through which businesses seek to understand stakeholder concerns, assess potential harms, and shape decisions accordingly. While HRDD emphasizes rightsholders, stakeholder engagement focuses on stakeholders. Rightsholders are subjects who hold rights, meaning that their wellbeing and interests have intrinsic value and are sufficient to give rise to corresponding legal and/or moral duties on others. Meanwhile, individuals who are engaged in value creation and trade and who can affect or be affected by corporate actions are stakeholders. For companies, that translates into paying attention at least to customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and financiers.

While both approaches help identify and mitigate human rights risks, they assume identifiable rights- and stakeholders, legitimate representatives, and a degree of social and institutional stability. Yet these foundations are often themselves under reconstruction in post-conflict societies. Although hHRDD remains relevant in transitional settings, many of its processes—including stakeholder engagement and access to remedy—presuppose relationships and institutions that may still be fragile. Responsible business conduct therefore raises not only questions of rights protection, but also of social and relational reconstruction. Drawing on 20 ongoing semi-structured interviews with Syrian civil society actors, activists, and scholars, we examine responsible business engagement in Syria’s reconstruction under conditions of institutional fragility and contested understandings of human rights. Discussions of recovery consistently emphasize trust, coexistence, legitimacy, participation, and social repair. Rather than challenging hHRDD, we suggest that many post-conflict challenges are fundamentally relational, inviting further reflection on what stakeholder theory might contribute to responsible business conduct in transitional societies.

Syria and the Challenge of Reconstruction:

The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 has renewed discussions about Syria’s reconstruction. Yet describing Syria as “post-conflict” may be premature. Many societies emerging from violence occupy a fragile space between war and peace, what some scholars describe as a  buffer condition, characterized by weakened institutions, contested authority, uncertainty, and the continued risk of renewed violence. Our interviews suggest that Syria reflects many of these dynamics. While participants expressed hope, they also described deep mistrust, trauma, fragmentation, and unresolved questions of justice and legitimacy. Importantly, interviewees emphasized that reconstruction is not only about rebuilding infrastructure and the economy, but also about rebuilding society itself.

Reconstruction is therefore as much a social process of restoring trust, repairing relationships, and re-establishing coexistence as it is a technical or economic one. Understanding these dynamics is essential for considering the role of human rights and responsible business conduct in Syria’s transition.

Human Rights, And

Human rights remain an essential component. In contexts such as Syria, they provide important protections against abuse, persecution, discrimination, and arbitrary exercises of power by articulating basic standards of dignity, equality, security, and participation. They also offer a normative framework for guiding reconstruction efforts and holding powerful actors accountable. At the same time, our interviews suggest that human rights alone may not capture the full range of concerns shaping everyday life in transitional Syria. While interviewees rarely rejected human rights outright, they often described reconstruction in relational rather than legal terms.

Participants spoke about the need to learn how to exist and coexist again after years of violence and displacement. They emphasized rebuilding trust between communities, restoring social legitimacy, creating spaces for dialogue, and addressing deep social divisions that continue to shape everyday interactions. Others highlighted the importance of social repair, arguing that rebuilding relationships and repairing damaged social fabrics may be as important as rebuilding formal institutions. Questions of justice also emerged in ways that extended beyond formal rights frameworks. Interviewees discussed contested memories, competing understandings of victimhood, and uncertainty over who should be included in reconstruction processes. For many, the challenge was not simply whether rights were formally recognized, but whether people could rebuild meaningful relationships with one another and develop confidence in emerging social and political institutions.

These observations do not diminish the importance of human rights, but suggest that reconstruction involves a broader set of social processes that cannot always be fully understood through the language of rights alone. Understanding how these relational dimensions shape post-conflict recovery may therefore be critical for thinking about responsible business conduct in transitional societies.

A Stakeholder Theory Approach

Recent scholarship has increasingly sought to bring stakeholder theory and human rights into conversation with each other. In this context, stakeholder obligations refer to the responsibilities firms have toward those affected by their activities, including duties to recognize stakeholder interests, engage with affected groups, account for potential harms, and incorporate these concerns into decision-making. For example, respect for human rights is morally and temporally prior to stakeholder obligations. Human rights provide the ethical minimum that must be respected before other forms of social and economic cooperation can occur. Stakeholder obligations, therefore, are not alternatives to human rights obligations but build upon them. Yet while human rights establish what ought to be respected, stakeholder relationships help explain how rights become embedded in practice. Rights are ultimately experienced through relationships in workplaces, communities, and institutions.

This insight strongly resonates with our interviews in Syria. Participants rarely questioned the importance of human rights but consistently emphasized trust, dialogue, legitimacy, participation, and coexistence. These themes are not meant to be alternatives to rights protection but as conditions through which rights can be realized and sustained. In this context, individuals cannot be understood only as rightsholders entitled to protection and remedy. They also need to be seen as part of the relationships through which reconstruction develops. This means seeing them as neighbors, victims, former adversaries, families, and communities trying to rebuild life together after conflict. Stakeholders, as well as rightsholders, are not abstract categories but individuals with names and faces.

This perspective also highlights a limitation of (h)HRDD in buffer conditions. Effective due diligence depends on identifiable rightsholders, legitimate representatives, and meaningful participation. Yet many interviewees described fractured trust, contested authority, and uncertainty over representation. In such contexts, the challenge is not only conducting better due diligence, but rebuilding the relationships that make due diligence possible. If human rights provide the normative foundation for recovery, stakeholder relationships may help create the social conditions through which those rights can be realized in practice.

Stakeholder Reconstruction

Our analysis points toward what we tentatively describe as stakeholder reconstruction. While the concept remains under development, it emerged from a recurring observation across interviews. Simply put, it refers to the process through which individuals and collectives regain the capacity to participate, represent interests, engage institutions, and rebuild trust after prolonged conflict and social fragmentation. Rather than assuming the existence of identifiable and engaged stakeholders, the concept draws attention to the social, relational, and institutional work required for stakeholders to emerge as meaningful participants in reconstruction processes. For example, discussions of reconstruction were often less focused on formal governance mechanisms and more concerned with rebuilding relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, and other social actors. Participants frequently emphasized the need to restore trust, create spaces for dialogue, rebuild legitimacy, and reconnect communities fractured by years of violence and displacement. These concerns were not presented as alternatives to human rights, but appeared as necessary components of a broader reconstruction process through which rights could become meaningful in practice.

Much contemporary human rights governance focuses on identifying harms, protecting rights, and establishing accountability mechanisms. These remain essential objectives. Yet in post-conflict societies, efforts to protect rights may unfold alongside a parallel challenge, i.e., rebuilding the relationships and social structures through which those rights are exercised and experienced. This observation may be particularly relevant for hHRDD. Human Rights Due Diligence assumes that companies can identify affected stakeholders, engage rightsholders, assess impacts, and establish meaningful forms of participation and remedy. During buffer conditions, however, these assumptions may not always hold. Communities may be fragmented, representative structures may be weak or contested, and social trust may be severely damaged. As a result, companies must first consider whether the conditions necessary for meaningful due diligence exist before deciding how due diligence can be conducted. The challenge may therefore not simply be conducting better due diligence, but participating in processes that help rebuild the relational foundations upon which due diligence depends. 

For companies, this means that due diligence cannot always begin with formal consultation or impact assessment. In buffer conditions, companies may first need to do preparatory relational work to understand who can speak, who is excluded, which community structures are trusted, and where participation may expose people to risk. This may involve working with trusted local intermediaries, creating safe spaces for engagement, and taking time to understand fragmented or contested relationships before asking stakeholders to participate in due diligence processes. Stakeholder reconstruction can therefore be seen as part of responsible business conduct in these settings, rather than as philanthropy, because it helps create the conditions under which credible hHRDD can take place.

Stakeholder reconstruction offers one way of thinking about this challenge. It directs attention toward the restoration of trust, legitimacy, participation, and social connectedness among those affected by conflict, permitting them to put in practice the agency they are entitled to. In this sense, stakeholder reconstruction does not replace human rights governance. Instead, it may complement it by helping create the relational foundations through which human rights commitments can move from normative aspirations to lived realities. Indeed, if human rights establish the normative foundation for recovery, stakeholder reconstruction may help create the social conditions through which those rights can be understood, articulated, claimed, and ultimately realized in practice.

Whether stakeholder reconstruction constitutes a necessary precondition for meaningful human rights due diligence in buffer conditions remains an open question—one that we believe deserves greater attention in future BHR research.

Conclusion

If post-conflict reconstruction is fundamentally a process of rebuilding relationships, trust, and social legitimacy, then the question may not simply be how businesses conduct HRDD in transitional societies. It may also be whether certain forms of stakeholder reconstruction are necessary before due diligence can meaningfully function at all. Syria’s transition reminds us that reconstruction is not only about rebuilding the tangible, namely institutions and infrastructure, but also about rebuilding the very foundations of human life, meaning relationships. Our interviews suggest that in buffer conditions, stakeholder reconstruction may be as important as infrastructure reconstruction. Before individuals can participate in engagement processes, claim rights, access remedy, or contribute to collective decision-making, they may first need to regain the trust, legitimacy, recognition, and social connectedness that conflict has disrupted. While human rights remain the normative foundation for responsible business conduct, our findings suggest that trust, legitimacy, dialogue, and social cohesion may play an important role in making those rights meaningful in practice. We therefore ask: if human rights tell us what ought to be protected, might stakeholder relationships help create the social foundations through which those protections become lived realities in societies emerging from conflict?