On the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, supermarket chain ATB opened selected “pivot” stores, enabled cash withdrawals, held prices at last pre-war levels, rerouted supplies, introduced purchase limits on basic goods, and offered extra incentives for staff and drivers working in dangerous areas (ATB wartime statement). The decision that private companies make in such a setting shows how the private sector can be pulled into compounding or alleviating problems of access, scarcity, affordability, logistics, and worker safety in a context of widely varied institutional collapse.

The issue is not that markets become important only or particularly when there is a humanitarian crisis. Banks, logistics companies, utilities, telecoms, retailers, and private clinics are all important for civilian life in normal circumstances too. The question is how conflicts, institutional collapse, authority fragmentation, and humanitarian contraction remove realistic alternatives and make private operations a material condition of access to fundamental rights.

This article argues that Business and Human Rights (BHR) has started to address this problem but does not yet have a general account of it. The corollary question is not whether firms reduce, contribute to or are directly responsible for harmful human-rights outcomes. Rather, it is about how to talk about the responsibility of private actors that play an infrastructural role in the access to vital goods and services.

Beyond Harm Avoidance

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights apply across contexts and expressly address conflict-affected settings. Principle 7 and the UN Working Group’s 2020 report on business, human rights, and conflict-affected regions further address business conduct in conflict settings and the need for heightened action. Principles 11-13 establish the corporate responsibility to respect; Principles 17-21 set out human-rights due diligence; Principle 23 requires companies to respect internationally recognised human rights wherever they operate, including when faced with conflicting requirements, and to treat the risk of gross human-rights abuses as a legal compliance issue; and Principle 24 requires companies to prioritise the most severe human-rights impacts when it is necessary to sequence responses. The UNDP/Working Group guide on heightened human-rights due diligence translates these expectations into practical steps.

Thus, the critique is not that the UNGPs ignore conflict or only provide peacetime guidance. More precisely, the framework focuses primarily on identifying, preventing and mitigating adverse human rights impacts linked to corporate activities and business relationships. Aguirre & Pietropaoli’s analysis of enhanced due diligence and Nagaivska & Uvarova’s discussion of companies that do not themselves influence conflict dynamics illustrate how this framework can be expanded and adapted to acknowledge context, vulnerability and the effects of conflict itself.

The question that remains is whether this framework adequately describes situations in which civilians’ access to a crucial service materially depends on the continued functioning of a private company. Uvarova & Bernaz’s study of Ukrainian food retail in the wartime context is a useful step in this direction. They demonstrate how food retailers may become a de facto regulator of access to essential goods when public regulation erodes, taking into account, however, the need to balance food retailers’ responsibilities against the safety of employees and consumers.

The difference can be briefly summarized: avoiding harm is not the same as sustaining life. A company may not be responsible for a war or a public failure, but its decision to shut down, cease, divert, or dramatically raise its prices may decide whether people have access to food, medicine, communications, transport, or money.

When Markets Become Essential Infrastructure

Under fragility, it is not the importance of markets that shifts but the surrounding dependence structure. Losses of authority, institutional collapse, and conflict destabilise regulation, eliminate alternatives, fragment authority and turn an ordinary commercial decision into a high-stakes bottleneck for access to survival-enhancing goods and market alternatives.

Huddleston & Wood’s case study of Yemen “functional economy” points to a broader political economy scenario whereby households depend on non-recognised, alternatively regulated markets for cooking gas, water, electricity, medicine, currency exchange and sources of income. Sufficiently functioning markets can sustain individuals, but at the same time, facilitate dominant non-recognised authorities, rent-seeking and political fragmentation. Research by Batley & Mcloughlin and Hönke & Thauer on non-state service providers in conflict and post-conflict contexts finds that private provision may be selective, unaffordable, weakly-regulated and substitutive of public capacity.

Pipicella distinguishes supportive corporate power (which enhances public capacity), from substitutive power (which replaces it and may corrupt the social contract). In their works, Dahi and Abboud demonstrate how wartime economic transformation in Syria eroded the distinction between formally and informally organised institutions, and how business elites and non-state private security agencies interlink with governance and coercion in a state of war. Likewise, human-rights research exploring privatised essential services and private healthcare demonstrate that private provision does not remove the state’s duties of regulation, monitoring, affordability, accountability.

Consequently, BHR authors should consider explicitly the question of community-side essentiality: not merely whether a business relationship is necessary for the corporation, but whether survival of the business is essential to rights-holders in the community who have no real choice but to rely on it. Community-side essentiality does not by itself create a legal duty to operate. However, community-side essentiality does raise the severity, foreseeability, and irreversibility of any abrupt corporate closure or withdrawal.

Humanitarian Contraction is an Intensifier, not the Whole Theory

Humanitarian agencies do not usually run national power grids, retail banks, telecoms markets, or food markets. When they withdraw, this does not necessarily lead to corporate substitutive power. In protracted crises, humanitarian, development, public, private, and community actors operate simultaneously.

Research on the humanitarian-development-peace nexus shows that this transition is often complicated by funding, political, and institutional challenges. The relationship between public, humanitarian, and private provision is therefore better understood as layered rather than as an orderly handover. The OECD-UNHCR analysis shows that private sector engagement in displacement settings has largely involved businesses providing goods and services as contractors, while also recognising a role for private and community-led alternatives where public services are fragile or severely capacity-constrained. These dynamics become more important as humanitarian support declines. UNHCR’s 2025 funding analysis reports that it has had to reduce its activities and workforce by around one third, with $1.4 billion in essential programmes being cut. The funding decline has already affected “every sector – from financial aid to health, education, and clean water”, reducing both humanitarian presence and direct assistance. This does not mean that private actors simply replace humanitarian organisations. But when public services are weak and humanitarian support is reduced, people may rely more on businesses for essential goods and services.

Sudan illustrates this interaction. UNDP’s Private Sector Engagement Strategy shows how businesses in Sudan continue to provide essential goods and services despite the conflict. Where public capacity is limited, they also help sustain livelihoods and local markets and complement humanitarian assistance. The dependence can run in both directions: during Sudan’s 2024 telecommunications blackout, the UN Fact-Finding Mission A/HRC/57/CRP.6 found that disruption to communications and mobile-money transfers affected civilians while also severely constraining humanitarian and emergency operations. In Yemen, the UN Panel of Experts (S/2020/326) similarly warned that deterioration of the banking system could jeopardise private banks’ management of “external payments for imports, humanitarian assistance in the form of cash transfers and remittance transfers”, noting that many of these operations had already shifted to money exchangers.

Continuity also raises a question about who bears its risks. Hassouneh’s study of opposition-held Syria shows how remote humanitarian programming can shift physical, financial, and reputational risks onto local staff and intermediaries. The ICRC/Norwegian Red Cross study of urban services during armed conflict similarly emphasises that water, electricity and sanitation depend not only on infrastructure but on the personnel and contractors who operate and repair these systems. Any account of private continuity must therefore ask who bears the danger of keeping essential services running.

From Exit Responsibility to Continuity-Sensitive Due Diligence

The BHR guidance provides an existing bridge: OHCHR guidance on remaining and exiting explains that the UNGPs neither call for immediate withdrawal nor expect companies to remain. Instead, they emphasise the need to assess the context, including the human rights consequences of failing to exit. The OECD Due Diligence Guidance also calls for consideration of the social and economic consequences of disengagement.

The question left unresolved is when responsible conduct may call for staying, adapting operations, or facilitating a transition rather than withdrawing. This should be understood as continuity-sensitive due diligence, not as a freestanding international legal obligation to remain. Normatively, this is not a new class of positive corporate obligation, but an elaboration of the corporate responsibility to respect through heightened human-rights due diligence and responsible-disengagement principles. Scholarship on positive corporate duties to advance socio-economic rights provides a further normative resource, but remains contested.

A continuity-sensitive approach may be appropriate when a company is a material and foreseeable bottleneck for access to an essential service, interruption would cause substantial and difficult-to-remedy impacts, and continued operations or alternative arrangements can be implemented without exposing workers or communities to unacceptably high risks. It should also contemplate whether the company’s continued presence enhances the public sector’s capacity or entrenches unaccountable private rule.

Five Questions for BHR

Companies and investors – and possibly states, humanitarian coordination bodies, sectoral initiatives, and future UN guidance – should address the following questions:

1. Continuity: Will the closure, suspension, rerouting, or transfer of a company interrupt access to an essential service, and are viable contingency arrangements possible?
2. Access and affordability: Can people access essential services across territorial and political divides, and at prices they can afford? This approach embraces the business-and-peace literature’s observation that the conflict-degeneration process includes loss or restriction of essential services.
3. Workers and local partners: Who is exposed to the physical, financial, and reputational risks of continued company presence, and are there sufficient protections and remedies for them?
4. Conflict and authority: Does the company potentially strengthen armed groups, abusive authorities, discriminatory structures or rent-seeking networks while still facilitating the shipment of essential goods?
5. Public recovery: Does the company help strengthen public and community capacity, or does it foster long-term dependence on private actors?

These questions do not make companies surrogate states. They recognise that where communities depend on businesses for essential services, responsible conduct may require more than simply avoiding harm.

Conclusion

The argument is therefore conditional. Where civilians depend on a company for essential goods or services, and withdrawal would cause severe harm that is difficult to remedy, the company should consider whether it can continue operating safely. If it can, responsible conduct may mean staying, adapting its operations, or planning a careful transition rather than leaving abruptly.

This does not shift responsibility away from states or donors, nor should private provision replace efforts to rebuild public institutions. But BHR needs to take seriously the role of companies when people depend on them for essential services. In such settings, decisions to stay, adapt, or leave can have direct consequences for civilian life.