Business, NGOs and Non-State Actors

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Business, NGOs and Non-State Actors

• PI4553

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Outline

• Non-state Actors
• Expanding Role
• Business Actors
• NGOs and Theories of Influence
• Spiral Theory
• Market Theory

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Expanding Role of Non-State Actors

• Types of non-state actors
• Importance for human rights
• Increase in non-state actors
• Implications for traditional IR theory?

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Private Security Firms

• PSFs expanding role
• 20,000 private contractors in Iraq
• Human Rights violations and accountability

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Business and Human Rights

• Corporations Power and Responsibility
• Human rights standards
• OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises
• UN Global Compact
• 10 principles
• Voluntary CEO letter/reporting
• What sorts of firms?
• Symbolic Politics?
• http//www.abdn.ac.uk/pol209/globalcompact_web.pd
  f
• UN Special Representative on Business and Human
  Rights appointed by Sec Gen (John Ruggie)

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Corporate Accountability

• Compensation by corporations for past abuses
• Forced labour/Nazi Regime claims against Swiss
  Banks and German Industries in US courts
• US Alien Tort Claims Act (1789)
• any civil action by an alien for a tort only,
  committed in violation of the law of nations
• Claims against oil companies, claims against
  private contractors responsible for Abu Ghraib
• Most claims where corporation aided and abetted
  a state in governmental violations Clapham p. 254

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NGOs

• Influence of NGOs and the Paradox of Empty
  Promises
• Spiral Theory, Risse, Ropp and Sikkink
• Stages and mechanisms
• Boomerang pattern

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How NGOs work

• Market for transnational support
• Too much suffering, too little compassion
• Selection NGOs looking for high value causes
• Theoretical argument
• And IR and Spiral theory?
• Depiction of NGOs

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Challenges to HR NGOs

• Bias? (see Ron etal)
• Special focus on powerful and high visibility
  countries (US abuses) in addition to general
  suffering.
• Mission blurring? Shift away from prisoners of
  conscience
• Membership challenges
• Logic of collective action

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Revision

• Do non-state actors influence human rights?
• In which of Steven Lukes lands would one be most
  likely to encounter an argument for the
  government employing a torturer to advance the
  communitys interest? Could it be a democracy?
• What are the principal shortcomings of Truth
  Commissions?
• How might you argue that the agent makes an
  important contribution to the level of human
  rights violations?

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A rough guide to concepts and topics

• 20th Century Genocides and Response
• Banality of Evil
• United States exceptionalism and human rights
• 1st generation rights
• International Criminal Court
• Shortcomings of Truth Commissions
• Principals and agents
• Machiavelli and the Inquisitor -- Leaders
  motivations for violations
• Agents motivations for violations.
• Spiral Theory/NGOs

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continued

• Toleration
• Consociationalism
• Policies /regimes implied by toleration
• Limits of toleration
• Human rights/animal rights
• United Nations institutions and human rights
• International Bill of Human Rights
• Reservation
• Social contract theorists
• Utilitarianism
• State of Nature

• Revisionism
• Nanking and incentives to violate
• Command responsibility
• Positive and Negative rights
• Standard model
• Goldhagen argument
• Psychological approaches
• Non-state actors
• Global Compact
• Challenges to human rights sovereignty,
  culture,