Transnational Corporations and the Shifting Boundaries of Justice

TRANSCORP aims to advance our understanding of the changing interface between business and society by analyzing the judicialisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – a phenomenon that is increasingly observed in the European Union, and notably in France, where the recent adoption of the ‘duty of vigilance’ law has opened the prospect that transnational corporations could be sued by third-parties for not taking sufficiently into account the risks generated by industrial activities across their production chains.

While CSR had long been considered a matter of voluntary issue for private businesses, the on-going hardening of soft law remains an under-researched topic.

This project aims to address this gap, by exploring how the agencies of a variety of state and non-state actors – such as transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), supranational institutions (EU, OECD) – intersect at different levels in the production of transnational legal cases that encapsulate competing claims for justice.

The main contribution of TRANSCORP will be to investigate this ‘judicialisation turn’ as mirroring the overarching institutional significance that TNCs have acquired in a world power system that has become increasingly fragmented.

This will help us to develop a fine-grained description of how the ‘hybrid sovereignty’ that these private entities had consolidated for themselves in a few decades of globalization has become more and more contested as human societies are faced with both an explosion of social inequality and a worrying disruption of planetary equilibriums.