Toward a Strategic Engagement with the Question of the Corporation

Abstract

Corporations, in their quest for the highest profit margin, have violated human rights, labour rights and environmental standards for decades, with little to no accountability. In recent years, the fight for corporate accountability under the banner of “Business and Human Rights” has come to dominate civil society’s engagement with the “question of the corporation.” This chapter aims to critically examine the political objectives underpinning the broad-church project of Business and Human Rights in its world-making aspirations, taking the Legally Binding Instrument currently under discussion at the UN Human Rights Council as a case study. Using a historical narrative approach, this article first situates the evolution of Business and Human Rights within neoliberal globalisation and, against this backdrop, attempts to think through the “dark side” of this particular strand of human rights activism. By bringing critical legal scholarship on the corporation and human rights into closer conversation with Business and Human Rights, the article aims to excavate the latter’s structural flaws, namely that it leaves the asymmetries in the global economy and the imperial corporate form unchallenged. By problematising Business and Human Rights’ presupposition of business as fact and its uncritical embrace of rights as positive change-makers, the article presents an invitation to rethink strategic political objectives vis-à-vis corporate rights abuses.