The Violence We Unsee: Human Rights Erasures in Supply Chain Capitalism

Abstract

Violence caused by business practices along global value chains have inflicted myriad forms of massive harm and posed far-reaching regulatory challenges. The role that human rights could play in rendering corporate violence visible, remediable, and litigable remains quite contested. On the one hand, debates on business and human rights have driven a regulatory revolution over the last decade that is associated with the rise of the human rights due diligence (HRDD) norm. On the other hand, this revolution has been largely ignored by scholars in critical international political sociology; indeed, many critical scholars maintain that human rights are ineffective toward, or complicit in violent neoliberalism. This article bridges the scholarly divide by harnessing insights from the political, historical, and legal critique of rights to expose the inherent limitations of HRDD as the new hope for remedying corporate violence globally. Through a spectral lens, I explore foundational assumptions about the taxonomy of (un-)seeing corporate violence; business subjectivity and (ir-)responsibility for violence; and the epistemology of rendering knowledge on corporate violence (in-)admissible. This article contributes to multidisciplinary and pragmatic research on governing supply chain capitalism, understanding HRDD as a potentially powerful tool - provided it is accompanied by reforms tackling discourses, structures, and knowledges that condition corporate violence.