Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability: Introducing New Players and New Theoretical Challenges

Abstract

Corporate accountability for complicity in past and ongoing gross violations of human rights and economic crimes is a rapidly growing area of interest in the transitional justice field. Addressing such violations and their role in fueling conflict and repression is now recognized as a key component of societies’ efforts to come to terms with the past, and, perhaps even more importantly, creating the conditions for non-recurrence of violent conflict and human rights abuses. Truth commissions have increasingly included such economic violations in their mandates, and corporate actors have been the focus of a number of high-profile court cases. Such civil claims and criminal cases appear to offer limited redress thus far, but the normative landscape of transitional justice is shifting, both at national and international levels. Scholarly interest has spiked, as illustrated in the review essay in this volume by Evelyne Owiye Asaala, which highlights three new volumes that unpack recent developments. We also see increased civil society mobilization to demand that corporate actors are held to account and contribute to reparations. In some cases, the amounts that corporate actors can or will contribute to compensate survivors dwarf the financial contribution to reparations funds by governments, demonstrating not just their potential contribution to transitional justice, but the scope of their liability for past abuses.1