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).
Click link for more information.
Date: April 20, 2023 | 11am-12pm
Location: Zoom Webinar
This webinar will examine the interplay between Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, surveillance practices, and global governance norms. AI technology has extended the power of states to track citizens due to advances in biometric identification systems, social media monitoring, and predictive policing techniques. While entrenched autocracies are making eager use of these new capacities, more open political systems are also incorporating these tools, raising troubling questions about the impact on due process, free expression, and active citizenship. How will the growing availability of AI technologies impact democratic governance, fuel repressive practices, or undermine the rule of law? The answer depends on efforts by international organizations, national governments, civil society groups, and the wider global community to craft new norms around AI. What those norms look like and how they will shape existing practice and future innovation is hotly debated. Participants will come away with a better understanding about the stakes involved in these conversations and the ensuing policy implications.
Date: March 9, 2023 | 11AM to 12PM EST
Zoom Webinar
This webinar will investigate the right of everyone to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications (“right to science”) and the reasons why this right is necessary and important. Participants will learn about the applications of states’ essential obligations under the right to science to develop, diffuse, and conserve science; what these obligations actually mean; and explore science and human rights in the context of infectious diseases. Panelists will discuss how the right to science framework is a necessary complement to attaining the right to the highest available standard of physical and mental health, and other human rights.
Date: December 8, 2022 | 11am-12pm
Location: Zoom Webinar
The collection of data related to at-risk populations in Latin America remains a pending obligation for the region's national governments. With respect to LGBTQ+ people, international bodies have revealed that the existing data do not reflect the full dimensions of the violence and discrimination experienced by queer persons in the Americas. Visible is a non-governmental platform developed by a Mexican NGO, with the support of Georgetown University. It allows for the collection of violent and discriminatory incidents against LGBTQ+ people, and demonstrates how ICTs can counter societal misinformation and provide information to decision makers to create data-driven inclusive policies.
Date: June 8, 2022 | 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Location: Virtual Online
This webinar focuses on the right to water in communities impacted by Haiti’s three gold mining and exploitation permits. The “spillover” effects of gold mining in Haiti have serious implications for water and other natural resources, extending its impact on local communities.
The Global Justice Clinic at New York University Law School has provided technical support to the Kolektif Jistis Min (Justice in Mining Collective, or KJM), a group of Haitian social movement organizations formed to support communities in Haiti’s mineral belt and to encourage a national dialogue about the industry. KJM’s aim is to educate affected communities on the consequences of mining for water as well as the environment, work, agriculture, and land, to push for national transparency and a debate on mining.
Our panelists include human rights and legal experts Margaret Satterwaite and Ellie Happel from the Global Justice Clinic, hydrologists Beth Hoagland and Tess Russo, and Haitian activist and organizer Olriche Jean Pierre from KJM. Dr. John Dale, Director of Movement Engaged and Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, will moderate the panel.
They will discuss the lessons they have learned from the dialogue between scientific and local indigenous knowledge produced during their collaboration, and how these forms of knowledge may shape and become shaped by human rights principles and law. Additionally, the panel address the Importance of community participation and leadership in every phase of the study, and the challenges of negotiating when local knowledge versus scientific knowledge (or human rights principles) should prevail; how to translate data into advocacy for community rights, particularly in the context of an absent State; and how generalizable their project might be for contexts outside Haiti.
Note: This Zoom webinar will provide simultaneous translation channels in Haitian Creole and English. Attendees can choose the channel they prefer.
Date: June 15, 2022 | 6 pm Moscow Time, 11 am EDT
Location: On Zoom (Contact kramanuj@gmu.edu for meeting information)
Dissertation Title: "The Idea of Global Sociology in The International Sociological Agenda: Unity and Diversity of Interpretations"
Ivan Kislenko holds MA in Sociology from Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is a PhD student at HSE University (Moscow, Russia) and Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium), pursuing the double doctoral degree program in sociology. Currently, Ivan is a Fulbright Affiliate Research Fellow at George Mason University (2021-2022) and an Affiliate of the Movement Engaged Research Hub.
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?
Read more: Click here to access complete Program
Date: April 6, 2022 | Time: 2:00PM to 4:00PM
Panel discussion with Jonathan Liljeblad (Australian National University), John Dale (George Mason University), Khin Maung Win (Justice for All), and Su Yin Htun (Mandalay University)
This panel interrogates the role of lawyers, the legal profession, and legal reforms in Burma’s pro-democracy movement. Throughout the decades of rule, Burma's various military regimes used the law and legal system as instruments of authoritarian control. They suppressed any resistance from the legal profession. Famously, however, many law students and attorneys did participate in the Burmese democracy, often receiving lengthy prison sentences or even losing their lives as a result. Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s, there were also a number of transnational campaigns that sought to instigate change inside of Burma by advocating for legal reform and corporate accountability in societies like the United States. The panel would seek to present a range of perspectives to identify the issues facing Burma's lawyers, judges, law schools, and legal system. It also seeks to offer prognostications for the future and recommendations for international action
Date: April 8, 2022 | Time: 3:00PM - 4:30PM
Speakers: Sarah Federman (Prof. of Negotiation and Conflict Management, University of Baltimore), John Dale (Prof. of Sociology/Anthropology, George Mason University), Susan Hirsch (Prof. of Conflict Resolution, Carter School, George Mason University), Douglas Irvin-Erikson (Assistant. Prof. of Conflict Resolution, Carter School, George Mason University)
Moderator: Richard E. Rubenstein (Professor, Carter School, George Mason University)
On the 5th day (Friday, April 8th) of the Carter School Spring 2022 Peace week events, we have a discussion on Sarah Federman's new book, "Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability" (2021) with the author and a panel of experts.
Visit Event Site for further information: https://carterschool.gmu.edu/news-events/carter-school-peace-week/spring-2022-peace-week
We congratulate Sarah Federman on the launch of her book. She had also recently published an article on Corporate Social Responsibility in the Harvard Business Review (For accessing the article: Click Here)