Accountability from below: Archimedes' lever and bringing justice for past corporate human rights abuses

This talk is based on a forthcoming book on Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice: Deploying Archimedes’ Lever (co-authored with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal-Bermúdez, Cambridge University Press, 2019). The book traces accountability efforts for economic actors’ complicit in past authoritarian state and armed conflict violations. It examines judicial and non-judicial forms of accountability. The book explores the barriers to accountability but also how local actors have managed to overcome those barriers to bring economic actors to justice. The Archimedes’ Lever approach adopted in the book focuses on four sets of factors: local mobilization, institutional innovators, international pressure, and the veto power of the economic sector