Books by Grietje (River) Baars
In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of... more In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of law in the global political economy. Closing a major gap in historical-materialist scholarship, they demonstrate how the corporation, capitalism’s main engine from city-state and colonial times to the present multinational, is a masterpiece of legal technology. The symbiosis between law and capital becomes acutely apparent in the question of ‘corporate accountability’. Baars provides a detailed analysis of corporate human rights and war crimes trials, from the Nuremberg industrialists’ trials to current efforts. The book shows that precisely because of law’s relationship to capital, law cannot prevent or remedy the ‘externalities’ produced by corporate capitalism. This realisation will generate the space required to formulate a different answer to ‘the question of the corporation’, and to global corporate capitalism more broadly, outside of the law.
The Corporation: A Critical, Multi-Disciplinary Handbook
The corporation has become a dominant form of economic life. While corporations have been with us... more The corporation has become a dominant form of economic life. While corporations have been with us since the early modern era, their influence and importance have grown exponentially. Today, corporations are among the largest economic entities in the world. Their annual turnover is greater than the gross domestic product of all but the largest nation-states. A handful of large corporations dominate most key global markets. Corporations – and their extended value chains – are an important source of employment. Governments rely on corporations – directly or indirectly – for tax revenues, expertise, and economic development. Citizens rely on corporations for everyday needs such as transport, healthcare, food, and utilities such as power and electricity. If we really want to understand the contemporary economy, a good place to start is the corporation.
The corporation has become an increasingly dominant force in contemporary society. However, compr... more The corporation has become an increasingly dominant force in contemporary society. However, comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the concept of the corporation is often restricted, or limited to one disciplinary approach. This handbook brings together the cutting-edge scholarship, expertise and insight of leading scholars in a wide range of disciplines, notably management studies, law, history, political science, anthropology, sociology and criminology, using a critical approach to dissect and understand the corporation. Ten chapters provide overviews of the state of play of critical scholarship on the corporation in each of these disciplines. Further contributors tackle current hot topics, such as corporate social responsibility, corporate crime, global value chains, financialization, and the interaction between corporations and communities. Finally, they consider resistance and alternatives to the corporation. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book is an invaluable resource for all readers studying the past, present and future of the corporation.
Articles, Book Chapters & Reviews by Grietje (River) Baars
Third Text, 'Imagining Queer Europe then and now' (special issue), 2021
Developed from their public dialogue at the Edinburgh conference ‘Cruising the Seventies: Imagini... more Developed from their public dialogue at the Edinburgh conference ‘Cruising the Seventies: Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now’ (March 2019), this article discusses the afterlives of the 1970s, and another seventies (the 1870s), within the political imaginaries of contemporary struggles in the UK and France. Building on our own engagement and observations as community activists, we discuss the influence of 1970s collectives and communes in present day queer organising; the animation of a trans antifascist poetics, such as the work of Laurel Uziell, in street protests; and the role of queer readings of Paris Communard Louise Michel in the imaginary of members of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests). We argue that a praxis of ‘queer hirstorical materialism’ that mobilises the queerness and genderqueerness of historical resistance is active in contemporary queer and trans struggles against neoliberal and right-wing governments and neofascists, and more broadly, for revolution.
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2019
Law's role in upholding and continually reproducing the cisheteropatriarchy is increasingly being... more Law's role in upholding and continually reproducing the cisheteropatriarchy is increasingly being challenged in Western courts. This is happening directly, by 'non-gendered' claimants wishing to undo law's compulsory gender performance, and by 'birthing men' seeking to queer law's gender binary. Indirectly 'fucking' law's gendering function are the defendants in the so-called 'gender deception' prosecutions. Here we see the judicial system reasserting its hegemony as heteronormmaker and enforcer. A different face of state pushback against queer anti-normativity shows in accommodation: several European courts have recently ordered the creation of a third gender option. This paper evaluates these 'queer cases', and asks what the queer struggle with the heteronormative can tell us about law's social function, its relationship to the body, its material effects and emancipatory potential more broadly. Can we queer the legal structures that seek to know, categorise, assign, police and contain our genders and sexualities or is now the time to say 'fuck law'?
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2019
Law’s role in upholding and continually reproducing the cisheteropatriarchy is increasingly being... more Law’s role in upholding and continually reproducing the cisheteropatriarchy is increasingly being challenged in Western courts. This is happening directly, by ‘non-gendered’ claimants wishing to undo law’s compulsory gender performance, and by ‘birthing men’ seeking to queer law’s gender binary. Indirectly ‘fucking’ law’s gendering function are the defendants in the so-called ‘gender deception’ prosecutions. Here we see the judicial system reasserting its hegemony as heteronorm-maker and enforcer. A different face of state pushback against queer anti-normativity shows in accommodation: several European courts have recently ordered the creation of a third gender option. This paper evaluates these ‘queer cases’, and asks what the queer struggle with the heteronormative can tell us about law’s social function, its relationship to the body, its material effects and emancipatory potential more broadly. Can we queer the legal structures that seek to know, categorise, assign, police and contain our genders and sexualities or is now the time to say ‘fuck law’?
Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law, 2015
The corporation - and especially its more complex, globally networked version, the multinational ... more The corporation - and especially its more complex, globally networked version, the multinational enterprise - is increasingly a target of intense debate. Critics report on ‘corporate complicity’ in conflict situations, environmental disasters and degradation in the oil, gas and mining sectors, the privatisation of war through the use of mercenary-like contractors, the monopolisation of intellectual property rights over essential medicines, the buying up of vast swathes of agricultural land in poverty- stricken areas of the Third World, the commodification and for-profit provision of various previously essential public services such as education and healthcare, and finally the seemingly reckless speculation on financial markets, leading to taxpayer- funded bailouts. It is felt that corporate power is able to grow unchecked, giving rise to ‘corporate excess’,2 that international trade rules are skewed in corporations’ favour,3 that bilateral investment treaties and instruments such as the putative transatlantic trade and investment treaty (TTIP) will provide a ‘Corporate Bill of Rights’, that ‘corporate accountability’ is falling short,4 and that we experience ‘governance by corporations’.5 Indeed, it has come to the point, perhaps the point of neoliberalism’s resolution between ‘the public’ and ‘the private’, that we increasingly look to corporations for leadership in both the realm of ideas and management.6
Although oftentimes corporations’ influence over, abuse of, or impunity from, international law are identified as key causes of our discomfort with corporate power, a deeper understanding of the precise relationship between (multinational) corporations and (international) law remains absent in such critiques. In this chapter I show how a historical reading of the concurrent development of corporations, law and capitalism can lead us to an alternative assessment of ‘the question of the corporation’ and why we might formulate different responses to this question in today’s global political economy. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between corporations, law and capitalism should enable us to reassess to what extent law is an adequate response to this question.
London Review of International Law, 2016
Corporate accountability (CA) legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value... more Corporate accountability (CA) legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value extraction. Accountability struggles effectively to reduce corporate capitalism's violence to the good corporate citizen's occasional 'wrongdoing', which becomes a calculable risk capable of being exchanged-signifying 'planned impunity'. CA, though a seemingly emancipatory process, thus exemplifies law's constitutive role in capitalism and the need to move beyond law for emancipation.
Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law Online, 2004
I am very excited about my book being discussed in the Völkerrechtsblog and grateful to Michael B... more I am very excited about my book being discussed in the Völkerrechtsblog and grateful to Michael Bader for organising it, and for the six readers taking their time to dip into my 500-page tome. I hope I can do some justice to the reviews in these few words, and for the questions or comments not addressed, I hope the opportunity arises for a face to face discussion, over a beer perhaps. It has been really wonderful to reconnect with a dear old friend – Hannah and I practically wrote our PhDs together in London – enjoying intense discussions over wine, tea and jigsaw puzzles. It’s good to see an old co-worker, Miriam, and a more recent friend and collaborator on the Role of Law in Global Value Chains interdisciplinary research project, Klaas Eller, as well as three scholars I have yet to get to know.
Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 2011
Rosa Luxembourg’s 1900 pamphlet 'Reform or revolution', which critiqued reformist political strat... more Rosa Luxembourg’s 1900 pamphlet 'Reform or revolution', which critiqued reformist political strategy, has relevance to, and finds echoes in today’s debates on the possibility and desirability of using law to protect society from the market’s negative effects. It also summed up the nineteenth-century 'Polanyian' reformist and Marxist 'revolutionary' perspectives. Polanyi argued that 'the economic' must be 'embedded' in the social by means of legal regulation, an argument he illustrates with the help of the 'Speenhamland' example. Marx, while acknowledging the role of the legal struggle as part of class struggle, concludes that ultimately 'right can never be higher than the economic structure of society'. Marxist legal theorist Pashukanis developed this position in his 'commodity form theory of law' which points to the structural impossibility of law’s regulation of capitalism. While contemporary 'Polanyist' Ruggie again asserts that legal and soft law 'global governance' regimes can control capitalism’s main instrument, the corporation, Shamir contra Ruggie argues that the 'moralisation of markets' through corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to the 'marketisation of morality' or a change in what we perceive law to be (and who has legitimate authority to regulate) rather than a 'taming' of markets. Following Shamir, I add that this corporate-led global governance hastens the collapse of capitalism, and confirms the inevitability of revolution and the subsequent creation of a law-free society.
Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 2020
Rosa Luxembourg’s 1900 pamphlet 'Reform or revolution', which critiqued reformist politic... more Rosa Luxembourg’s 1900 pamphlet 'Reform or revolution', which critiqued reformist political strategy, has relevance to, and finds echoes in today’s debates on the possibility and desirability of using law to protect society from the market’s negative effects. It also summed up the nineteenth-century 'Polanyian' reformist and Marxist 'revolutionary' perspectives. Polanyi argued that 'the economic' must be 'embedded' in the social by means of legal regulation, an argument he illustrates with the help of the 'Speenhamland' example. Marx, while acknowledging the role of the legal struggle as part of class struggle, concludes that ultimately 'right can never be higher than the economic structure of society'. Marxist legal theorist Pashukanis developed this position in his 'commodity form theory of law' which points to the structural impossibility of law’s regulation of capitalism. While contemporary 'Polanyist' Ruggi...
The Corporation
The corporation has become a dominant form of economic life. While corporations have been with us... more The corporation has become a dominant form of economic life. While corporations have been with us since the early modern era, their influence and importance have grown exponentially. Today, corporations are among the largest economic entities in the world. Their annual turnover is greater than the gross domestic product of all but the largest nation-states. A handful of large corporations dominate most key global markets. Corporations – and their extended value chains – are an important source of employment. Governments rely on corporations – directly or indirectly – for tax revenues, expertise, and economic development. Citizens rely on corporations for everyday needs such as transport, healthcare, food, and utilities such as power and electricity. If we really want to understand the contemporary economy, a good place to start is the corporation. Corporations are not just economically important. They play a vital role in politics. Corporations have become political actors in and of themselves. For instance, in the USA, corporations have been granted the rights of free speech and religious freedom normally given to flesh-and-blood citizens. Worldwide, corporations often have a huge influence on the creation of international agreements and standards. For instance, large corporations play an important part in drafting international trade and investment agreements. In some cases, corporations end up playing a quasi-state role – particularly when governments are unwilling or unable to provide basic citizenship rights. For example, they have become important sources of welfare services, such as healthcare, education, and housing in some settings. With the rise of neoliberalism, many states have outsourced the provision of public services to corporations. In the UK alone, about 50 per cent of public spending is outsourced – and a majority of that spending goes to corporations. The result is that activities which only a few years ago were seen as a preserve of the state – such as waging war or imprisoning citizens – have become corporatized activities. In other settings, corporations have taken on a role of providing civic rights. For instance, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook claim to provide spaces of free speech. Some even claim that corporations now play a role in helping to guarantee political rights – such as the process of collective deliberation which takes place in company-sponsored ‘multi-stakeholder initiatives’.
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 2022
This forum has come about through a series of conversations and discussions over a period of time... more This forum has come about through a series of conversations and discussions over a period of time in 2021-2022. Our ambition was to bring together scholars from different disciplines and perspectives, hoping for mutual curiosity and dialogue. We invited the participants to the forum to consider the following question: “How can we understand the complex and often contradictory ways through which sexualities and capital are related to, shaped by, and constitutive of each other?” Due to restrictions and exigencies of the corona situation together with time zone obstacles, the conversation had different modes. The first part of the forum consisted of an online video-recorded conversation between M.E. O’Brien, Nat Raha and Grietje Baars. The conversation was moderated by Liu Xin and Mathias Klitgård. Laura Horn provided editorial support. Jin Haritaworn and Lisa Adkins then kindly sent their contributions to this conversation in writing. What you will read in the following is hence a co...
Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Jan 26, 2024
On hearing that the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in her words, “forgot to demand ... more On hearing that the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in her words, “forgot to demand a ceasefire”, Bisan Owda, the Gaza filmmaker and storyteller, posted these words on her Instagram story: “The ICJ is a lie!! There is no justice in the World!!”. Bisan, one of the several Gazans live-reporting the past 100+ days of genocide to her now 4.1 million followers, added in a reel, “Thanks, world. We will go back to doing this, like we started it, alone.” In the comments, maybe thousands of people try to reassure Bisan that the ICJ decision was a win, that Israel is literally “on notice” and the world is (still) watching. So, who is right today? Is it Bisan, in Gaza and living (we hope) through the genocide or those that are celebrating the ICJ decision as at least a partial win?
The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, 2019
London Review of International Law, 2020
This article is a *situated* response to symposium contributions on my monograph, Grietje Baars, ... more This article is a *situated* response to symposium contributions on my monograph, Grietje Baars, The Corporation, Law, and Capitalism: A Radical Perspective on the Role of Law in Global Political Economy (Brill, 2019)
Social & Legal Studies, 2014
Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law Vol. 12, 2005/2006 , 2007
In 2005 an attempt was made at enforcing international law on an American corporation said to be ... more In 2005 an attempt was made at enforcing international law on an American corporation said to be complicit in war crimes, extrajudicial killing and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment committed by the Israeli military. The civil suit, brought in a U.S. court, was dismissed without a hearing, in a brief statement mainly citing reasons of political expedience. The claimants in Corrie et al v Caterpillar include relatives of several Palestinians, and American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who were killed or injured in the process of house demolitions carried out using Caterpillar’s D9 and D10 bulldozers. They brought a civil suit in a US court under the Alien Tort Claims Act, for breaches of international law, seeking compensatory damages and an order to enjoin Caterpillar’s sale of bulldozers to Israel until its military stops its practice of house demolitions. An appeal is pending and will be decided on in the latter half of 2006. This article analyses the legal claims made in the case, as well as the politics of enforcement, and the economics of compliance. It concludes that, while in Filártiga, the court recognised that “plainly, international ‘law’ does not consist of mere benevolent yearnings never to be given effect.”, the Caterpillar appeal provides the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit with the opportunity to halt economic interests riding a metaphorical bulldozer through the law of nations, and instead, to show that domestic courts faced with individual claimants are in fact be instrumental in upholding (or letting down) international rule of law.
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Books by Grietje (River) Baars
Articles, Book Chapters & Reviews by Grietje (River) Baars
Although oftentimes corporations’ influence over, abuse of, or impunity from, international law are identified as key causes of our discomfort with corporate power, a deeper understanding of the precise relationship between (multinational) corporations and (international) law remains absent in such critiques. In this chapter I show how a historical reading of the concurrent development of corporations, law and capitalism can lead us to an alternative assessment of ‘the question of the corporation’ and why we might formulate different responses to this question in today’s global political economy. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between corporations, law and capitalism should enable us to reassess to what extent law is an adequate response to this question.
Although oftentimes corporations’ influence over, abuse of, or impunity from, international law are identified as key causes of our discomfort with corporate power, a deeper understanding of the precise relationship between (multinational) corporations and (international) law remains absent in such critiques. In this chapter I show how a historical reading of the concurrent development of corporations, law and capitalism can lead us to an alternative assessment of ‘the question of the corporation’ and why we might formulate different responses to this question in today’s global political economy. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between corporations, law and capitalism should enable us to reassess to what extent law is an adequate response to this question.
The decision shows that acceptance of intersex, and other manifestations of sex or gender beyond the binary, is finally becoming more common. At the same time, the history of LGBITQA struggles warrants us to pause for thought: is ‘positive Anerkennung’ (affirmative recognition) really all that positive?
In this post I will call attention to the limits to recognition’s emancipatory potential, the possibility of gender-proliferation ad absurdum, and I will take another look at the privacy argument made by K. I conclude with a reappraisal of the ‘null-option’ and support for scrapping gender registration altogether.
Miéville’s monograph inspired a new generation of international law scholars to explore these arguments and apply them in discreet areas such as international economic law (Rasulov), to specific questions including the question of international law and imperialism (Knox), to particular movements such as the international human rights movement (Kotiaho) and in order to deconstruct legal proposals to policy questions, e.g. in the field of ‘corporate accountability’ (Baars).
In this paper I explore both Pashukanis’ and Miéville’s commodity form theory of law as examples of anarcho-communist legal theory. I comment on the emergence of a new body of anti-law work at this precise moment (period) in time – the significance of its emergence in international law scholarship – while extrapolating where this generation’s work may take us next. Specifically, I will argue that this new anti-law scholarship can (must) play a key role in revitalizing the struggle against the ‘injustices’ of neoliberal and biopolitical governance, by exposing and articulating law’s function within capitalism and inspiring a redirection of so-called ‘rights-based’ activism into meta-, extra- and counter-legal avenues.
[I put ‘anarcho-communist’ in parenthesis in the title of this paper as while I discuss their work as fitting within this framework, the authors cited do not necessarily self-identify as ‘anarcho-communist’.]"
Arriving at the ‘Beit Hanoun crossing’ (the Arabic name for the same place) from the Gaza side. A long wait in a tarpaulin hut with Gazans in wheelchairs. Then the international is called out to proceed, to what looks like a military base, electrified fences, watch towers, a high wall on either side. Into the mesh corridor. At the end, doors without handles in a concrete walls. Three doors in a row. Eventually one door silently slides open, to a wider corridor with metal turnstiles, that do not open when pushed. A voice from a loudspeaker: Open your bags and put them on the table. Then lights go green and the turnstile gives way. Beyond this, one knows to wait for an instruction, a green light. One is being watched, being moved. One knows, to step into a body scanner, without instruction. Like a rat in a maze one proceeds as red lights go green. A green light leads one to a side door. Once inside a small room a soldier appears behind a glass window. Take off your clothes and put them in the machine! she shouts. Cameras above, one in each corner. Below, a cattle grid floor and much further below, seemingly empty space, darkness. Take off your clothes, or go back to Gaza! she shouts. Some hours later, leaving the small room, the spacious terminal building, a white taxi takes me past Aroma café, Israel’s equivalent to Starbucks.
Erez/Beit Hanoun: the separation between occupied Gaza and Israel, the separation between the Fourth Geneva Convention and international armed conflict, between state and ‘hostile entity’, between resistance and terrorism, between colonialism and conquest, between civilisation and third world destitution, between aggression and self defence. Beyond ‘no fly zone’ and ‘responsibility to protect’. Erez/Beit Hanoun, where internationals pass and very few Gazans – where some Gazans enter but never leave – the interrogation chambers and prison cells below ground.
In this paper I analyse the meaning of the spatial organisation caused by the terminal, its function in the production of identities in international law. In particular, I comment on the function of the technology in internalising and resisting particular interpretations and determinations of international law. The paper is accompanied by some photographic and other visual material."
Current and emerging mechanisms aimed at achieving compliance by corporate actors with such norms are based on the premise that compliance must “make business sense.” Compliance must be “marketable” or it must be shown that compliance leads to the creation or opening of new markets for corporate actors to be persuaded. Non-compliance will be avoided only insofar as its cost is higher than its benefit. Viewed from the perspectives of the norms, this phenomenon could be described as the “marketization of morality” or even “marketized compliance.”
However, could compliance with norms as we know them ever be achieved through marketized compliance or do these new mechanisms risk eroding these norms? Subsequently, seeking to set the goalposts for compliance at the level the market will bear may mean equating the status quo with “compliance.”
In other words, are we witnessing an erosion of existing legal norms while at the same time allowing “business sense” to dictate what the new norms are? Is this a privatisation of law, a “compliance” of the law with the market rather than vice versa?
Moreover, is this situation new or simply a more visible/explicit expression of a structural characteristic of law per se?
This paper will attempt to answer the questions posed through the analysis of several examples, offer a tentative conclusion as well as an alternative strategy which resists/subverts the marketization of law in particular in the area of “business & human rights.”
Although my research was carried out specifically in the context of international human rights/humanitarian law violations, its findings are applicable more broadly also to the regulation of financial, environmental and other risks generated by the activities of corporate individuals.
Throughout the module, you will be able to follow and critically evaluate the various ways law, race and colonialism meet to shape much of the world we live in today.
With this thesis, I aim to present a counterpoint to this literature. Employing dialectics as methodology and a theoretical frame based on Pashukanis’ commodity form theory of law, I investigate the progeny and role of law as sine qua non of capitalism. I establish that capitalism’s main motor, the corporation, was developed as a legal concept to congeal relations of production and minimise risk-exposure of the capitalists. Moreover, the corporation served as an instrument of imperialism and the global dissemination of capitalist law. Post WWII international criminal law (ICL) was developed ostensibly as an accountability mechanism. I show that it was used, contrary to early indications, to conceal rather than address the economic causes and imperialist nature of the war, so as to enable the continuation or rehabilitation of trade relations. ICL has been institutionalized over subsequent years and has continued to immunize economic actors from prosecution, including in the ICTR and ICTY. Yet, ICL’s strong appeal has led ‘cause lawyers’ to seek corporate accountability in ICL, largely unsuccessfully. Combined with (legalized) ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘corporate accountability’ discourse risks becoming an instrument of legitimization for the liberal capitalist enterprise. Especially, including the corporation as a subject of ICL would complete its reification and ideological identity as a political citizen exercising legitimate authority within ‘global governance’. In conclusion, while emancipation from corporate violence cannot be achieved through law, its promise lies in counter-systemic activism and, with that, human emancipation."