Gro Nystuen , Andreas Føllesdal and Ola Mestad (eds), Human Rights, Corporate Complicity and Disinvestment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 290 pp, £55.00 hb.
| Author | Malcolm Langford |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2012.00941_2.x |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
Gro Nystuen, Andreas Føllesdal and Ola Mestad (eds),Human Rights, Cor porate
Complicity and Disinvestment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011,
290 pp, £55.00 hb.
The rise and rise of the most visible manifestation of globalisation, transnational
corporations, continues to confront our established categories of law and political
theory.In this book of ten chapters, authors grapple with the challenge from the
perspective of a new entrant on the global scene: the sovereign wealth fund.The
entity under particular scrutiny is the Norwegian Pension Fund, which is not
only the second largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (at around USD 450
billion) but is subject to ethical investing guidelines and supervision by a Council
of Ethics, which possesses the authority to recommend disinvestment. In this
sense, the publisher’s description of the book, and partly the book title itself, are
misleading. It is not a ‘thorough introduction’ to corporate social responsibility
but instead a relatively-focused, carefully-mediated and interdisciplinary reflec-
tion on human rights and corporate complicity in the context of the Norwegian
Pension Fund.
The merits of the book are fourfold. First, it uses the emergence of sovereign
wealth funds as an opportunity to ask a range of broad questions about the
investment arm of corporate responsibility,often, over-shadowed by debates on the
responsibility of the corporate entity and its executives.The second is showcasing
of the Norwegian Pension Fund and its ethical scaffolding – particularly in
chapters by Nystuen, Chesterman, Mestad and Chapman – sending a message
that this ad hoc but potentially powerful body, the Council of Ethics, deserves
critical scholarly attention, in much the same way we have seen with other
international quasi-judicial bodies that monitor global economic non-state
actors, such as theWorld Bank Inspection Panel and the Contact Points for the
OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises. Like the Inspection Panel, the
Council of Ethics has developed a jurisprudential mode of reasoning while its
effects have been at times politically dramatic: its most renowned recommenda-
tion required disinvestment in Wal-Mart on account of breaches of international
labour rights, which triggered vocal protests by the US government.
The third is the interpolation of scholars of international law and political
philosophy throughout the book (together with one consciously multi-
disciplinary chapter) such that the reader is continually exposed to both the legal
and ethical sides of the relevant question at hand.The fourth is that as the book
progresses,and this cross-disciplinary conversation grows, certain assumptions are
peeled away, revealing a greater than imagined gap between the demands of
ethical investment, on one hand, and the current state of international law, and
even the ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Pension Fund, on the other.
The book also contains some weaknesses. The foremost of these is the
Introduction, which is devoted to describing the book’s contents and the role of
the Council of Ethics (only to be repeated in the following two chapters).
Beyond a brief discussion of normative legal frameworks, the book is not
empirically,legally and contextually situated; it introduces neither the context of
institutional investment and the rich history of disinvestment nor, and most
importantly,the var ious legal and ethical puzzles that the publication sets out to
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Reviews
© 2012 TheAuthors. The Modern Law Review © 2012The Modern Law Review Limited.
1178 (2012) 75(6) MLR 1175–1188
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