Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations

This edited volume is the first collection to critically explore the role, limitations, and internal fragmentation of social activism for corporate accountability across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. It analyses a variety of NGOs, trade unions, and grassroots movements and their transnational mobilizations for holding accountable economic actors involved in massive infringement of human rights – from war crimes and crimes against humanity, to forced labour, extreme environmental degradation, and the violent targeting of human rights activists. It emphasizes the diverse visions and strategies extolled by these civic actors: from civil and criminal litigations, efforts to prohibit and punish business misconduct through national and international legislation, to boycotts, political protests and memorialization projects. By adopting an actor-focused perspective and examining their national and transnational forms of activism, the collection provides an innovative perspective across three main themes: 1) civil society and social movements as key drivers of corporate accountability efforts; 2) the fragmentation of the global corporate accountability movement across ontological, ideological, regional and professional lines; 3) the Janus-faced paradigm of transnational activism for corporate accountability. The book argues that corporate accountability today does not, if ever it did, result from corporate self-governance, nor from state’s determination to secure legal regulations. Rather, the main driver advancing the criminalization of corporate involvement in human rights violations are the mobilizations initiated by civil society and social movements. This is especially true when pro-accountability actors form coalitions across borders and professional sectors. Such transnational and intersectoral engagements create counter-hegemonic discourses against corporate impunity, push for more inclusive justice projects, and multiply spaces and ideas of accountability.Nevertheless, their social action faces two significant obstacles. First, contemporary political, economic and legal structures more often constrain than enable binding sanctions against economic actors and durable accountability mechanisms. Such restrictive configurations include, among others, the veto power of business groups and technocrats in rapidly changing contexts of neoliberal and digital development; the weak international legislation that governs the relations between business, trade, and human rights; and the competing cultural structures of property rights, technology standards, and legal personhood. Second, civil societies and social movements themselves are fragmenting over the meaning, scope, and tactics of corporate accountability. This fragmentation is due to the different local, national and regional contexts, to the variety of ideological views on human rights and economic development, and to different professional understandings of accountability processes. New human rights ontologies advocating for a posthuman or transhuman order also contribute to this diversity of discourses and create new challenges and opportunities for activists seeking to reckon with corporate violence. This is an open access book.