Corporate Social Responsibility? ─ Human Rights in the New Global Economy

Questions surrounding the relationship between corporations and human rights prompted the ethnographers, legal scholars, and practitioners who contributed to the present volume to collaborate across disciplines to investigate the current codes and practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The volume presents CSR as a series of economic and political strategies that are shifting the focus of international human rights activism and signaling the rise of new forms of global governance. Part I is broadly speaking on actual CSR institutions. The contributors here explore CSR as a set of relations of communication and coercion. They draw on the latest CSR initiatives of corporations to analyze what current and emergent CSR strategies mean” for human rights. In Part II legal scholars articulate various global visions for the improvement of the human condition via robust assessments of corporate social responsibility. The contributors specifically discuss the strategies of lawyers and litigants who seek remedy to the lack of CSR or the distortion of CSR by corporations. Part III turns to CSR in Africa. Here a number of Africanists in history, anthropology, and political science examine the dilemmas, inconsistencies, and possibilities for the future of CSR as it increasingly impacts state sovereignty and human rights. The chapters reveal what the practice of CSR has become in a globalized economy and contextualize the results of litigation, increased surveillance, development partnerships, and institutional and social engagement. Eschewing easy answers, the volume probes CSR as theory and practice, outlining the challenges and possibilities for human rights in a world where corporate power is on the rise.

Charlotte Walker-Said is a historian of modern Africa and assistant professor of Africana studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.John D. Kelly is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he serves on the faculty board of the Human Rights Program. He is the author or coauthor of several books and, most recently, coeditor ofAnthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, also published by the University of Chicago Press.