Human Rights as an Element of Corporate Governance: International Politics and a Threefold Critique

For over a decade we have witnessed an ongoing institutionalisation of the idea of a corporate responsibility for human rights. The turn towards private transnational corporations has been presented as a pragmatic step towards ‘closing governance gaps’ in the human rights system, most prominently in the wake of the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. However, the concept of a corporate responsibility for human rights has also been sharply criticised on both legal and political grounds. How can we understand the politics of human rights inherent in the paradigmatic turn towards corporate responsibility in the international human rights system? The article addresses this question by examining the formation of the current business and human rights regime as a specific instance in a wider global governance discourse. I argue that the latter has brought about a dominant image of human rights as an object of governance. It is against this image that the more recent institutionalisation of human rights as an element of corporate governance becomes plausible. Drawing on James Ingram’s three images of the politics of human rights based on Hannah Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’, I then discuss the politics of human rights as an element of corporate governance and formulate three narratives of critique: a politico-economic critique, a radical-democratic critique, and a critique of hegemonic practice. I particularly examine the third critique, based on which I suggest an alternative, reflexive approach to understanding the politics of the current regime of business and human rights. It emphasises both the contingency and power-related dynamics of human rights norms.