Capitalizing Human Rights

Capitalizing Human Rights: A Genealogy of Business and Human Rights, 1974-2024 provides the first in-depth examination of the emergence of 'Business and Human Rights' as a juridical field ('BHR field'). Drawing upon fifty years of United Nations archives, this book argues that the BHR field is the culmination of attempts by scholars, civil servants, and activists to recast the corporation as a vehicle of social change responding to inequality. To date, rival accounts of the promise and purpose of realising this vision are yet to result in an international treaty, though negotiations continue. Instead, authority for the ongoing regulation of corporate conduct has been deferred to the transnational legal terrain. Here, the BHR field has flourished and given rise to a legal sensibility the book calls 'embedded pragmatism'. Drawing upon Third World Approaches to International Law and critical legal scholarship to analyse this deferral, it first considers embedded pragmatism as a legal sensibility, and subsequently, how lawyers conceptualize the relationship between international human rights law, markets, and states when adopting this sensibility. It argues that the BHR field creates a business of human rights, through which rights are prioritized to avoid crises in the global capitalist economy, ameliorating corporate inaction in global value chains by casting them as profitable. This further exacerbates global inequality, as the human rights project surrenders fully to the laws which regulate global markets. Crafting a premise for theorizing new approaches to Business and Human Rights utilizing the concept of embedded solidarity, the book then considers how the BHR field may yet be imagined differently.