Full Description
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 business actors involved in human rights violations and environmental degradation. The book 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, and memorialization projects. By adopting an actor-focused perspective and examining their national and transnational activism, the collection provides an innovative perspective across three main themes: civil society and social movements as key drivers of corporate accountability efforts; the fragmentation of the global corporate accountability movement across ontological, ideological, regional, and professional lines; the Janus-faced paradigm of transnational activism for corporate accountability. The volume argues that corporate accountability coalitions are successful especially when social actors form alliances 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. Yet, civil societies and social movements themselves are fragmenting over the meaning, scope, and tactics of corporate accountability due to different local, national and regional contexts, ideological variations regarding human rights and economic development, and diverse professional understandings of accountability processes. This is an open access book.
Contents
Introduction: Re-Envisioning Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses. Civil Society and Transnational Action.- Part I: Corporate Accountability: A Fragmented Global Cause?.- "A World Where There Are Many Worlds." Fragmentation of Civil Society Advocacy for a UN Treaty on Business and Human Rights.- Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability: Visions, Divisions, and Convergences of a Global Cause.- Corporate Accountability and the Ecological Turn: Mining Lessons from the Rights of Nature Movement.- Values and Limitations of Transnational Activism for Corporate Accountability in post-Civil War Guatemala.- Part II: Transnational Campaigns Against Corporate Impunity.- The Transnationalisation of Civil Society in East Asia's War Redress Movement.- Trade Unions and Corporate Accountability in Argentina: Transnational and Intersectoral Alliances.- Social Mobilisations and Corporate Accountability in Brazil: The Volkswagen Case and the Limits of Legal Settlements.- Structural Constraints and Civil Society Mobilisations for Corporate Accountability and the East African Community.- Luxembourgish Civil Society Mobilising for Corporate Accountability: Prospects and Challenges for Law Making From Below?.- Strategic Litigation for Corporate Accountability Through (International) Criminal Law. Dutch Legal Dynamics and Litigating Civil Society Organisations.- Part III: Promises and Limitations of Grassroot Activism.- Polenta and Cyanide? Investment Arbitration as Prospective Environmental Injustice in Roșia Montană.- From the International Boomerang to the "Domestic Boomerang": Advocating for Corporate Accountability for Past Human Rights Abuses in Argentina.- Forced Labour in Spain under Franco's Rule: Public Debates over Corporate Accountability in the Twenty-First Century.
