In collaboration with the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability (ACCA), the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz (CIJP), and Dejusticia, CAL recently launched the Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace (CLASP) Lab-- a social lab convened to advance corporate accountability in post-conflict and transitional settings around the world. The CLASP Lab is operating virtually in three languages, across multiple time zones, and with representation from about 25 countries-- mainly in Africa and the Americas.
We’re convening this space in order to share experiences and crowdsource ideas to advance accountability for the role businesses play in conflict-- including facilitating and profiting from human rights abuses. This blog post introduces the “what” and “why” behind the CLASP Lab-- our concept, why we’re working to advance corporate accountability in transitional settings, and why we chose a social lab model for this work.
Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses Committed During Conflict
Transitional justice refers to formal and informal processes for both legal justice and social reckoning with atrocities that occurred during civil conflict. Under a transitional justice approach, countries use judicial and non-judicial justice mechanisms, truth and reconciliation commissions, and repetition prevention processes to advance five fundamental aims: prosecution of perpetrators for some of the most serious crimes; truth-seeking and fact-finding; reparations for victims; reconciliation; and institutional reform.
(For an introduction to transitional justice, check out the links in the paragraph above and this panel hosted by New England Law Boston’s Center for International Law and Policy on transitional justice through the lens of what the US can learn from the rest of the world.)
Obviously politics and the allocation of social power-- including who’s in charge of implementing transitional justice processes, who would benefit from a true reckoning with the past, and whose interests would be compromised-- massively influence the genuineness and effectiveness of transitional justice attempts. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, despite sustainable peace requiring the recognition of the roles played by all types of actors during conflict, post-conflict processes around the world tend to inadequately address (or ignore completely) the direct and indirect participation of economic actors, including corporations and individual businesspeople in human rights abuses in the context of conflict.
All of this is to say that an immense accountability gap exists when it comes to companies that finance, facilitate, and/or benefit from atrocities committed during intrastate conflict-- from paying paramilitaries to kill union leaders in Colombia to using forced labor and financing conflict in Sierra Leone to land dispossession in Guatemala. This brings us to the necessity for cross-jurisdictional experience sharing and strategy building to address systemic corporate impunity.
The Social Lab Model
One of our projects at CAL focuses on advancing corporate accountability in transitional justice in Colombia and beyond. When we began this project and grappled with the layers of corporate impunity for abuses during conflict and root causes, we thought about how we might address this issue at a global level. We and our partners wanted to harness the vast experiences and knowledge of folks from around the world fighting against corporate impunity in post-conflict settings and push the needle on accountability. We spoke to potential participants who shared concerns of “network fatigue” and a desire for a new and different type of collaboration space. In light of this feedback and our goals, we landed on a “social lab,” a concept that Otto Scharmer and others introduced in the early 2000s and Zaid Hassan popularized.
Social labs are social, experimental, and systemic-- they convene a diverse group of stakeholders to test various strategies aimed at addressing root causes of social injustices. Like other types of labs, social labs test ideas in pursuit of a particular outcome and refine or rethink what doesn’t go as planned. (At CAL’s heart is our Legal Design Lab, where we apply design thinking to problems involving corporate abuse of human rights, so the social lab approach is right up our alley.)
In the case of our social lab-- the Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace (CLASP) Lab-- we’ve convened a diverse international group of lawyers and community advocates working towards justice for victims of corporate abuse during conflict. We’re embarking on a design thinking-based process to better understand this global phenomenon and proliferate potential strategies for accountability.
We’ve enlisted a community psychologist to help us maintain a trauma-informed process and an ethnographer to help us document this experimental journey.
Admittedly, we’re not social lab purists as far as membership composition, which would require a more diverse group of stakeholders. We intentionally excluded corporate actors because we think it’s important that all CLASP Lab members come to the table without conflicts of interest to advance corporate accountability-- including liability.
The CLASP Lab is meeting virtually throughout this year. While the CLASP Lab is a closed space to ensure the integrity of this unique process and protect participants, we’ll be able to make some information stemming from the substantive discussions within the Lab public. We hope that this lab will be a valuable experiment in cross-jurisdictional, cultural, and linguistic collaboration to protect people and the planet from corporate abuse during conflict. We also hope that what goes well in this experiment—and what doesn’t—will be helpful data points for others in the human rights field and social justice community more broadly as we imagine and create new spaces to accelerate impact and social change.
We’ll share updates on the CLASP Lab process as we go. To ensure global representation, the CLASP Lab operates in three languages -- Spanish, English and French. If you’d like to support this project and help us cover our increasing interpretation expenses, please consider making a donation to CAL.
Avery Kelly is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab, one of the co-convening organizations of the Corporate Liability & Sustainable Peace Lab.
