Corporate Accountability

Transnational Advocacy Networks and Corporate Accountability for Major International Crimes

This European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Project (principal investigator: Dr. Raluca Grosesçu, University of Bucharest) is funded by the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program, and implemented by the National University of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest.

In the spring of 2023, hub members, in collaboration with their European counterparts, are co-organizing the second of five program workshops (the first was in Paris last July), which will take place in Bucharest in late-May. The workshop will convene transnational advocacy and corporate accountability scholars and practitioners from five continents and result in a book.

The Struggle for Corporate Accountability: Strategies, Methods, Outcomes

Date: 20-21 November 2025

Place: SNSPA, Bucharest (Romania)

This conference seeks to broaden the current academic debates on corporate accountability by analyzing a variety of methods and assess how they have worked since the 1970s in different (and across) political and historical contexts, and with what outcomes. We encourage papers examining both legal and non-legal tactics. We see legal endeavors as critical tools for advancing legislation, jurisprudence, and legal doctrine. However, trials and legal reform are usually slow, extending over years or even decades and being marked by progress, reversals, and sometimes paralysis. Non-legal instruments can therefore support and complement legal action and, in contexts where legal recourse is unavailable or ineffective, can become alternative means of seeking accountability. For instance, when attracting broad participation, political protests and boycotts can put immediate pressure on corporations to withdraw their investments or adopt responsible business practices. Truth commissions and peoples’ tribunals can provide historical justice, while political art (including exhibitions, movies, performances etc.) can play a key role in reaching out wide audiences to denounce corporate crimes. Although trials and legal reform are essential for engendering accountability, non-legal instruments can enable more inclusive participation and empower communities, due to their capacity to build cross-boundary relationships between various social actors, including victims of corporate crimes, civil society, judicial officials, consumers, or investors.

Please submit your proposal including authors’ names, email addresses and affiliations, a short CV and an abstract of around 300 words by 1 March 2025.

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Business Perspectives on Corporate Accountability for Human and Environmental Rights Violations

Date: 13-14 March 2025
Place: SNSPA, Bucharest

This conference aims to revisit the current academic scholarship on corporate accountability by providing a platform for socio-historical analysis of the variety of business actors and their (potentially fragmented and competing) ideas, strategies, and lines of action in terms enhancing or undermining concrete responsibility for human rights violations and ecological degradation. Drawing from diverse disciplinary subfields and interdisciplinary areas of study (including but not limited to business history, management and administration studies, behavioral economics, political or economic sociology, anthropology, law & society, international relations), we aim to examine how different economic actors envisage corporate accountability, and connect businesses’ perspectives with their different visions of human rights, economic globalization, development, and democracy.

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Conference: Civil Society and Corporate Accountability: Actors, Visions, Strategies

Date: May 25 to May 26, 2023

Location: National University of Political Science and Public Administration, Bucharest

This conference explores the role of national civil societies and transnational advocacy networks in the struggle to hold accountable economic actors for their involvement in massive infringement of human rights, ranging from genocide and war crimes, to torture and forced labor, and to extreme environmental degradation. It examines a variety of NGOs, epistemic communities, trade unions, and grassroot movements which seek justice across the world, and the ways their strategies are informed by different national and regional contexts and diverse ideological and professional understandings of accountability processes.

For additional information, please contact Raluca Grosescu (raluca.grosescu@politice.ro).

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Corporate Accountability for Gross Human Rights Violations - An Intersectoral Workshop

Date: July 7, 2022

Location: Paris Institute for Advanced Study, 17 Quai d’Anjou, Paris 75004

In the past 20 years, mobilizations for corporate accountability for gross human rights violations have proliferated across the globe. NGOs, trade unions, legal experts and social scientists have built transnational coalitions to raise awareness, enforce national and international legislation, boycott, and bring to courts multinational companies and their representatives accused of human rights violations.

This workshop explores how transnational social movements build such strategies in primarily four industrial sectors: spyware and digital technologies; arms, weapons, and military training industries; extractive industries; and the banking and finance sectors.

What are the specificities of these industries in respect to gross violations of human rights? What repertoires of contentious action are used to enforce accountability in these four industrial sectors? In what ways, under what conditions, and to what extent are they effective? What challenges and constraints do they confront? How do various industries, companies, and business associations respond to these campaigns given their various financial and reputational interests and organizational cultures? To what extent, if at all, is transnational activism better suited than national/ local campaigns to deal with corporate complicity in political violence? Are there different approaches to corporate accountability that fragment and even divide social movements and human rights activists according to regional and professional area of activism?