The Business of Transitional Justice

JOSE ROBERTO GABRIEL PEREIRA; LEIGH A. PAYNE; LAURA BERNAL-BERMUDEZ

The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice

OUP

Año: 2019; p. 289 - 310

The ?missing piece of the [transitional justice] puzzle? is how some scholars refer to accountability for corporate complicity in past authoritarian state or armed conflict human rights violations (Bohoslavsky and Opgenhaffen 2010:160). This essay probes that assertion. On one hand, findings from an original database of Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice (CATJ), show that transitional justice has, in fact, taken on corporate complicity in past human rights violations. Corporate accountability, however, remains highly limited, largely invisible, and innovative in the rare situations in which it occurs. It is not, in other words, part of transitional justice?s institutional design or formal process. In explaining why, this study concurs with other scholars who expose the weakness of transitional justice in grappling with the root causes of past violence (Gready et al. 2010). For transitional justice to include corporate accountability, it would begin to dismantle the economic and political power structures underlying authoritarian regimes and armed conflict violence. Analyzing corporate complicity thus begins to locate root causes as one of the missing puzzle pieces in transitional justice. Acknowledging the role of economic actors as agents of violence links physical integrity rights and economic, social and cultural rights, a lacuna, or missing puzzle piece, in transitional justice approaches (Sharp 2014). Corporate accountability for past human rights violations exposes the collaboration between economic actors and political elites that violently consolidated and reproduced socioeconomic inequalities during authoritarian governments and armed conflicts (Bowsher 2018). It uncovers the role specific economic groups played not only in their moral and ideological support for authoritarian regimes and armed conflict, but in financing, instigating, committing, perpetuating, and knowingly profiting from, the violence. Transitional justice has often been viewed as ?top down,? or driven by global, rather than local, understandings of human rights and accountability. Corporate accountability, in contrast, relies on local demand and agents without international interference. Indeed, the missing puzzle piece is that international pressure that would bolster local initiatives to promote accountability for gross violations of human rights. To probe corporate accountability as a missing puzzle piece in transitional justice is not only to document what has occurred and is underway in establishing the truth and justice for economic actors? participation in past violence. It is also to uncover violent collaboration between economic and political actors in the pursuit of exclusionary economic and governance models. It is to get at the root causes of the violence in those models. And it is to understand the power of local actors in shaping new transitional justice practices.