Global Production, CSR and Human Rights: The Courts of Public Opinion and the Social License to Operate

This paper takes at its starting point the responsibility placed upon corporations by the United Nations’ Protect, Respect and Remedy Framework as elaborated upon by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to respect human rights. The overt pragmatism and knowledge of the complex business relationships that are embedded in global production led John Ruggie, the author of the Framework, to adopt a structure for the relationship between human rights and business that built on the existing practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). His intention was that these practices should be developed to embrace respect for human rights by exhorting corporations to move from “the era of declaratory CSR” to showing a demonstrable policy commitment to respect for human rights. The prime motivation for corporations to do this was, according to Ruggie, because the responsibility to respect was one that would be guarded and judged by the “courts of public opinion” as part of the social expectations imposed upon corporations or to put it another way as a condition of a corporation’s social license to operate.
This article sets out the background context to the Framework and examines the structures that it puts forward. In its third and final section the article looks at how the Framework requires a corporation’s social license to be assembled and how and by whom that social license will be judged. The success or failure of the Framework in persuading corporations to respect human rights is tied to whether “the courts of public opinion” can use their “naming and shaming power” effectively.

Conflicts in the Middle East since 1945, (London: Routledge, 2007, Third Edition).

This third edition of Conflicts in the Middle East since 1945 analyzes the nature of conflict in the Middle East, with its racial, ethnic, political, cultural, religious and economic factors. Throughout the book Peter Hinchcliffe and Beverley Milton-Edwards put the main conflicts into their wider context, with thematic debates on issues such as the emergence of radical Islam, the resolution of conflicts, diplomacy and peace-making, and the role of the superpowers.

The book is brought fully up to date with events in the Middle East, covering, for instance, developments in Iraq in 2006 where a democratically elected government is in place but the insurgency show no sign of coming under control. The analysis of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is also brought up to the present day, to include the election of the Hamas government and the 2006 conflict between Israel and Lebanon’s Hizballah.

Including a newly updated bibliography and maps of the area, this is the perfect introduction for all students wishing to understand the complex situation in the Middle East, in its historical context.

Why is Russia flexing its muscles in the Middle East?

Syria’s bloody civil war suddenly became even more tangled in September with the start of a massive Russian bombing campaign on targets in the country. Two historians offer their personal takes on why Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes