Movement Engaged is dedicated to disciplined movement-engaged research relevant to social movement activists and policymakers. Housed within the Center for Social Science Research, we are a hub where scholars, activists, and other partners within and beyond George Mason University combine their experience, knowledge and skills in creating ideas, understandings, networks, and infrastructure to renew social movement theory and practice. We work to deepen democracy in formal politics, the economy, and in the broader civil society. Thus, through intentional engagement with community, constituency, and transnational organizations and networks, we seek to engender new visions, practices, relations, institutions, and systems that liberate human potential and emancipate our global society.
Our Projects
- “Digital Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia” for Japan’s Research Institute of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (MIETI)
- Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability for Major International Crimes
- Science, Technology, and Human Rights Webinar Series
- Intercampus Social Movement Workshop
NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
We’re delighted to announce the latest edited volume by our Director, John G. Dale, co-edited with Raluca Grosescu, titled Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations: Civil Society and Transnational Activism across the World.
About this book
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.
Event Highlights:
Revisiting the 2010s Protest Movements: Organization and Strategy in Post-Horizontalism
Dr. Nara Roberta Silva reexamines the protest wave of the 2010s — Occupy Wall Street and its global counterparts — in light of the shifting political terrain of the last decade. Through dialogue with recent scholarship and activist reflections, the talk revisits the period’s key challenges — organizational fatigue, fragmentation, and the absence of shared horizons — and argues that contemporary organizing inherits the 2010s’ unresolved tensions.
Nara Roberta Silva is Core Faculty and Praxis Program Head at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil, where she also earned her B.A. and M.A. Her research and teaching center on the intersections of social and political theory, racial capitalism, social movements, political economy, and participatory democracy, with a sustained commitment to public scholarship and social justice.
CSSR Movement Engaged Research Hub Weekly Meetings
The CSSR Movement Engaged research hub members meets every Friday from 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, both in-person and via Zoom. Please RSVP for Zoom link.
For Fall 2025 schedule: click here
The Struggle for Corporate Accountability: Strategies, Methods, Outcomes
For details: click here
Interested in joining the Movement Engaged Research Hub?
Please contact cssr@gmu.edu or John Dale at jdale@gmu.edu.