Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the contemporary struggles in the international legal community around responsibility of states, organizations and corporate actors for human rights violations. It proposes ethnography as an appropriate research route for understanding the relationship between claims of moral and legal responsibility.

Paper long abstract:

That moral responsibility and legal responsibility for specific wrongs are not necessarily the same thing is hardly news to victims of human rights violations. Claims of moral responsibility are narrative and performative building blocks of particular visions of social and political order, tied to ideas of how the world works. Responsibility, as imagined, delimited and adjudicated through international legal discourse strives to be a hard cold fact and a basis for specific amends. But it is also a relative novelty in international law. Hence the tensions in the legal community around the projects to enshrine mechanisms for establishing the responsibility of states, organizations and corporate actors for human rights violations in legally binding documents.

This paper is interested in the currency of the concept of responsibility in contemporary legal debates. It offers an exploration of some entry points for an ethnography of legal responsibility, such as NGO advocacy for corporate responsibility, and recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights. To ask who is legally responsible in an interconnected world is to transcend the limitations of the international legal system still premised on a vision of a community of sovereign nation-states. But the key objective of this paper is to enlist anthropology in the task of figuring out what kind of new world is being imagined and constructed by lawyers on different sides of this issue. This is important to know, for law has the strange power of solidifying moral claims into the status quo we all inhabit.