This blog post announces the formation of a new special interest group at the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association, Human Rights and Political Economy, sketching some core interests of the field and why they matter today. 

Human rights resources and authority are increasing marketized through privatization (water, prisons, military), commodification (food, housing, healthcare), and financialization (commodity derivatives, private equity), while business power poses new threats to the full range of rights, from privacy to labour. Understanding these forces is vital to understanding and challenging systemic denials of access to rights. The aim of human rights and political economy is to turn a critical human rights lens to contemporary capitalism, its ideology, techniques, and actors.

Access to marketized rights is often unfulfilled and retrogressing, including in developed states. Homelessness and housing-related poverty is rising in many jurisdictions. Access to food is made insecure by oligarchic agribusiness control and by trading on financial markets. Working conditions retrogress through state interventions and new business tactics. The right to social security is stripped back along with tax rates as a matter of ideology. Privatized water, healthcare, prisons and military contractors each have their horror stories and incremental debasements. Corporate lobbying shapes politics, their investments dictate economic policy, and financial techniques reorder society. These are political economy issues: the state does not prohibit affordable housing, rather the economy, here primarily business practices in the shadow of state regulation and incentives, structuralizes unaffordable housing.

Political economy issues are encompassed by international obligations to progressively realize rights and to protect rights from harm by third parties, and by more specific obligations such as to ensure affordable housing and eliminate insecure work, although they are not generally justiciable. These duties exist regardless of whether provision has been outsourced, but in practice reliance on the market has opened major gaps in protections, suggesting a need to reanalyse obligations. The corporate responsibility to respect human rights is a responsibility to ‘do no harm’, but with corporations controlling food, housing, labour and other essential human rights elements, a duty to avoid harm implies significant positive responsibilities. Human rights and political economy is particularly concerned with the state-business nexus. This includes how states regulate, incentivize, and permit business activity, and how businesses use their power to reshape state policy and rights outcomes. The international environment, its rules and its regulatory gaps, is equally important, particularly for transnational issues such as agribusiness, investment and climate change.

Two key analytical focuses should be first, a critical lens on new forms of harm to rights access, and second, a positive lens on new possibilities for realization. The former entails digging deep into how rights-relevant markets and business practices are constructed and identifying the pernicious elements therein. The latter entails reimagining the possibilities for a rights-realizing political economy, with an emphasis on both ensuring realization and redefining realization for the current times.

It is hoped that this group will be of interest not just to BHR scholars, but to those working in law and political economy, public policy, business ethics, economics, and political science. The aim of the group is to build a community around human rights and political economy that can collaborate on projects, review working papers, organize with likeminded associations, and over time look to publish together in blogs, an edited volume or journal special issues. The group welcomes all levels of participation and all perspectives. If you would like to sign up to the group or request more information, please email david.birchall.bhr@gmail.com

To conclude, I link three relevant papers. The first is a draft attempt by myself to define the field of human rights and political economy (comments extremely welcome!). Second, a recent paper attempting something similar in law and political economy. Third, an argument that human rights standards require a radical revision of contemporary capitalism.

Selected Readings

David Birchall, ‘Human Rights and Political Economy: Violations and Realization Under Global Capitalism’ (draft)

Jedediah Britton-Purdy et al., ‘Building a Law-and-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond the Twentieth-Century Synthesis’ Yale Law Journal

Anna Chadwick, ‘Human Rights, Poverty and Capitalism’ (September 23, 2020) GCILS Working Paper, No. 2, September 2020

David Birchall is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham Business School, based in Ningbo, China. He researches in Business and Human Rights and related topics. Read his piece on corporate power over human rights on FirstView here. It will be published in the upcoming issue of Business and Human Rights Journal.