Rights in a state of exception. The deadly colonial ethics of voluntary corporate responsibility for human rights

It is widely accepted that voluntary corporate responsibility for human rights is a means of continuing “business-as-usual”. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been denounced as “whitewash”, with little effect in practice. I claim here that voluntary CSR is far worse than “whitewash”: it actively bolsters corporate impunity by rendering the violence of development illegible and equating resistance with irrationality or subversion. It thrives upon the state of exception that provides the permissive context of human rights violations. I make this argument by returning to the birthplace of corporate responsibility for human rights: BP’s Colombian oilfields, combining ethnographic research with trenchant critique of the colonial myths informing mainstream discussion of business and human rights. The UN has responded to the potential of voluntary CSR to detract from abuses by emphasising the importance of judicial remedy. What the analysis here reveals is how voluntary measures and provision for judicial remedy may work in opposite directions

Global social fascism: violence, law and twenty-first century plunder

The intellectual authors of neoliberalism were aware of the lethal implications of what they advocated. For ‘the market’ to work, the state was to refuse protection to those unable to secure their subsistence, while dissidents were to be repressed. What has received less attention is how deadly neoliberal reforms increasing come wrapped in social, legal and humanistic rhetoric. We see this not only in ‘social’ and ‘legal’ rationales for tearing away safety nets in Europe’s former social democratic heartlands, but also in the ‘pro-poor’ emphasis of contemporary development discourse. This includes contexts where colonial legacies have facilitated extreme armed violence in service of corporate plunder. To expose these dynamics, I juxtapose the everyday violence of austerity in Britain with neoliberal restructuring in Colombia. The latter is instructive precisely because, in tandem with widespread state-backed terror, Colombia has held fast to the language and institutions of liberal democracy. It has, as a result, prefigured the subtle authoritarian tendencies now increasingly prominent in European states. The reconceptualization of law, rights and social policy that has accompanied neoliberal globalization is deeply fascistic. Authoritarian state power is harnessed to the power of transnational capital, often accompanied by nationalistic and racist ideologies that legitimize refusal of protection and repression, enabling spiraling inequality. Nevertheless, extending Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s discussion of ‘social fascism’, I suggest that widespread appeal to the ‘social’ benefits and ‘legal necessity’ of lethal economic policies marks a significant and Orwellian shift. Not only are democratic forces suppressed: the very meanings of democracy, rights, law and ethics are being reshaped, drastically inhibiting means of challenging corporate power

Mobilisation

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Beyond biopolitics: struggles over nature

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Racism! What do you mean? From Howell and Richter-Montpetit's underestimation of the problem, towards situating security through struggle

I suggest in this essay that colonialism and racism penetrate the intellectual foundations of security studies at a level deeper than recent discussion would have us believe. This is because of unstated or disavowed ontological assumptions that shape the parameters of the field and lead scholars to foreclose upon a deeper understanding of systemic, racialized relations of violence. The problem in much critical scholarship on security, I will argue, is not only a failure to grasp the centrality of structural racism to the practices and interventions under examination. It is a more insidious matter of what knowledges, experiences and struggles are invisible, and – as a result – what practices and interventions are not subject to examination because of the centrality given to security. Even when security is understood in the broadest sense, it is still practices that are about threat and danger, friendship and enmity, that catch the eye of the critical scholar. The result is a tendency to naturalize the denigration and abandonment of non-white and poor populations deemed lacking in the qualities for success within a profoundly violent global political economy. After staking out my critique – and why I think recent discussion of racism in security studies only scratches the surface of the problem – I will consider how research agendas and methods might be recalibrated with a greater sensitivity towards colonialism and race. Crucially, I caution against attempts to ‘decolonize security studies’ by seeking to add the insights of decolonial and critical race scholarship to the field (see Adamson, 2020) without attention to the ontological assumptions that make it natural to centre security. Taking inspiration from Lewis Gordon (2011) and Olivia Rutazibwa (2020), as well as from my own engagement with decolonial social movements, I propose that part of what is required is greater attention to lived thought, to how reality always exceeds the questions our scholarly communities lead us to ask, and to what is revealed when we consider security through the lens of struggle

Marxism, coloniality and ontological assumptions

At the heart of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis is a revolt against fetishism: the appeal to abstract categories, treating concepts as if they referred to things ‘out there’ in the world, independent of social relations). It is commonplace to note that studies of international relations routinely fetishise a system of ‘sovereign’ states, abstracted from history and the social relations, practices and ideologies that sustain state power. What Bieler and Morton emphasise is that even ‘Left’ analyses routinely make fetishistic appeal to concepts – ‘the state’, ‘the market’, ‘security’, ‘production’, ‘finance’, ‘knowledge’ – which are treated as things-in-themselves, devoid of human beings in their concrete social relations.1 Despite some scholars’ careless applications of the label ‘Marxist’ to such work, Bieler and Morton’s critique is very much in line with Marx’s own critique of a tradition of classical political economy so beholden to the modern obsession with uniformity and universality that it forcibly read history through the categories of bourgeois ideology (abstract individuals interacting in ‘the market’ and so on) that were made to look like ‘general preconditions of all production’.2 For the authors of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, these concerns take on particular urgency at a juncture marked by global economic ‘crisis’, the developmental ‘catch-up’ of emerging economies and inter-state rivalry shaped by the dynamics of global political economy.3 The last thing we need is more fetishism, more mindless repetition of abstract categories like ‘states’, ‘markets’, ‘security’ and so on. All this does is naturalise the existing order and insulate it from critique. Instead, Bieler and Morton insist, we must confront the historical contingency of capitalism and ‘be on guard against the use of fetishised concepts, categories or raw facts’.4 This is, in other words, a ‘necessarily historical materialist moment’.

Collective discussion: fracturing politics (or, how to avoid the tacit reproduction of modern/colonial ontologies in critical thought)

This article engages in an experiment that aims to push critical/post-structuralist thought beyond its comfort zone. Despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies, the article claims that these same ontologies are often tacitly reproduced, resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination. The article brings into conversation five selected critical scholars from a range of theoretical approaches and disciplines who explore the potential of the notion of “fracture” for that purpose. The conversation revolves around political struggles at various sites—migrant struggles in Europe, decolonial struggles in Mexico, workers and peasant struggles in Colombia—in order to pinpoint how these struggles “fracture” or “crack” modern political frames in ways that neither reproduce them, nor lead to mere moments of disruption in otherwise smoothly functioning governmental regimes. Nor does such “fracturing” entail the constructing of a “complete” or “coherent” vision of a politics to come. Instead, we detail the incoherent, tentative, and multiple character of frames and practices of thought in struggle that nevertheless produce an (albeit open and contested) “whole.

Émergence d’un nouveau péronisme ? Analyse des discours à la Nation de Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007)

L’étude des discours de Néstor Kirchner permet d’identifier les représentations sociales qu’il a mobilisées, et de montrer comment il s’inscrit dans le contexte du « virage à gauche » qui singularise aujourd’hui l’Amérique latine. Ses allocutions devant l’Assemblée nationale peuvent s’analyser sous l’angle de l’héritage péroniste, et particulièrement de l’imaginaire de la génération des années soixante-dix, et lui ont permis de transformer son image d’homme politique non charismatique en celle d’un leader providentiel.The analysis of Néstor Kirchner’s speeches enables us to account for the social representations he has deployed and show to what extent he lies within the scope of the currently prevailing « shift to the left » context in Latin America. His speeches before the members of Parliament can be analysed within the framework of the Peronist legacy and more particularly the 1970’s generation’s worldview. Thanks to those speeches, his public image has undergone a real transformation from one of a politician with little charisma to that of a providential leader.El estudio de los discursos de Néstor Kirchner permite identificar las representaciones sociales por él movilizadas y mostrar de qué modo el mismo se inscribe en el proceso de « viraje a la izquierda » que hoy define al contexto político latinoamericano. Sus discursos ante el Parlamento pueden ser analizados bajo la vigencia de la tradición peronista, sobre todo del imaginario de la generación del setenta, transformando su imagen de líder político no carismático en la figura de líder providencial

Mortality and pulmonary complications in patients undergoing surgery with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection: an international cohort study

Background: The impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) on postoperative recovery needs to be understood to inform clinical decision making during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study reports 30-day mortality and pulmonary complication rates in patients with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection. Methods: This international, multicentre, cohort study at 235 hospitals in 24 countries included all patients undergoing surgery who had SARS-CoV-2 infection confirmed within 7 days before or 30 days after surgery. The primary outcome measure was 30-day postoperative mortality and was assessed in all enrolled patients. The main secondary outcome measure was pulmonary complications, defined as pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, or unexpected postoperative ventilation. Findings: This analysis includes 1128 patients who had surgery between Jan 1 and March 31, 2020, of whom 835 (74·0%) had emergency surgery and 280 (24·8%) had elective surgery. SARS-CoV-2 infection was confirmed preoperatively in 294 (26·1%) patients. 30-day mortality was 23·8% (268 of 1128). Pulmonary complications occurred in 577 (51·2%) of 1128 patients; 30-day mortality in these patients was 38·0% (219 of 577), accounting for 81·7% (219 of 268) of all deaths. In adjusted analyses, 30-day mortality was associated with male sex (odds ratio 1·75 [95% CI 1·28–2·40], p\textless0·0001), age 70 years or older versus younger than 70 years (2·30 [1·65–3·22], p\textless0·0001), American Society of Anesthesiologists grades 3–5 versus grades 1–2 (2·35 [1·57–3·53], p\textless0·0001), malignant versus benign or obstetric diagnosis (1·55 [1·01–2·39], p=0·046), emergency versus elective surgery (1·67 [1·06–2·63], p=0·026), and major versus minor surgery (1·52 [1·01–2·31], p=0·047). Interpretation: Postoperative pulmonary complications occur in half of patients with perioperative SARS-CoV-2 infection and are associated with high mortality. Thresholds for surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic should be higher than during normal practice, particularly in men aged 70 years and older. Consideration should be given for postponing non-urgent procedures and promoting non-operative treatment to delay or avoid the need for surgery. Funding: National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, Bowel and Cancer Research, Bowel Disease Research Foundation, Association of Upper Gastrointestinal Surgeons, British Association of Surgical Oncology, British Gynaecological Cancer Society, European Society of Coloproctology, NIHR Academy, Sarcoma UK, Vascular Society for Great Britain and Ireland, and Yorkshire Cancer Research