Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Activism Across the World

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.

Raluca Grosescu is a Lecturer in Politics at the National University of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest, where she leads the ERC-Consolidator Project “Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability for Major International Crimes.” Her work focuses on the history of international criminal law, memory politics and corporate accountability. She has authored and co-authored various collections on international law and transnational justice and has published in journals such as the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Global Society, and the Journal of the History of International Law. Her latest monograph, Justice and Memory after Dictatorship: Latin America, Central Eastern Europe and the Fragmentation of International Criminal Law was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

John Dale is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Movement Engaged at George Mason University. He was a Science and Technology Innovation Program Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars (2019-20) where he researched the digital transformation of human rights, and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Visiting Research Fellow (2021-22) exploring efforts to integrate human rights into national policies on AI and robotics. He serves as Scientific Advisor on the ERC-Consolidator Project “Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability for Major International Crimes.” Dr. Dale was elected Council Member of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Human Rights (2019-2022) and to the Steering Committee of the Science & Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018-24). He is author of Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and co-author of Political Sociology: Power and Participation in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2009).