Global Corporations, Accountability and International Law

This research would form part of a larger project which aims to produce a new conceptual understanding of the relationship between global corporations, states, state law and international law. Such an understanding will take a legal/historical approach, focusing on how the mobility of global corporations is facilitated, how rights are created, and how corporate power is produced and made effective. This new understanding will contribute to the generation of new regulatory architecture capable of holding global corporations to account. The pieces of the puzzle I would work on at STIAS, would cover the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) and the birth of ‘international law’, and the ‘(Territorial) Trading Companies in Africa: twentieth century debt, decolonisation and the company’.