DFG-funded research project. Funding period: 2022-2025
Whether in form of the French Duty of Vigilance Law, the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act in Germany, or draft regulations on EU level, human rights due diligence (HRDD) has taken centre stage in in the business and human rights (BHR) regime, which regulates business activities in light of human rights standards. HRDD has gained widespread recognition as a pivotal standard to operationalize the corporate responsibility to respect human rights.
Yet what exactly HRDD entails or should entail, and who is responsible for conducting and monitoring it, remains highly contested as the great variety of actors involved in the BHR regime attach different understandings and expectations to the norm.
This project investigates the contested processes by which relevant actors in the BHR regime interpret, and thus give meaning to HRDD. The project is guided by the overall question: How does the contestation over divergent expectations and understandings shape the HRDD norm as such?
We take cutting-edge debates in International Relations (IR) norm research as our conceptual point of departure. Starting from the premise that norm contestion is a productive process that constitutes norms and facilitates their evolution, we aim to trace and unpack contestations over the meaning of HRDD. To do so, we first map the manifold understandings and expectations that actors, or norm interpreters, in the BHR regime attribute to HRDD. We then focus on four themes of contestation in the debates: (1) the norm’s soft and hard law dimensions, (2) the attribution of responsibility to regulate and conduct HRDD, with a specific focus on the relationship between public and private actors, (3) the degree of generality vs sectoral and issue-specificity of HRDD, and (4) the relationship between HRDD and legal liability.
The project contributes to an understanding of the different constellations of meanings that drive the debates and, therefore, the evolution of the HRDD norm in the BHR regime; conceptually, studying of the production of meaning around HRDD will allow us to examine the processes by which contestation facilitates the development of norms in IR.
Empirically, the project examines two cases demonstrating the global relevance of the HRDD and including positions in the Global North and South: The EU's mandatory HRDD initiative and the negotiations of a treaty on BHR at the UN Human Rights Council. Our analysis concerns documents, produced and submitted as part of the stakeholder consultation processes, and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders.
Janne Mende is a political scientist with a specialization in International Relations and International Political Theory. The awardee of the Franz-Xaver-Kaufmann-Prize 2022 heads the Research Group MAGGI since 2020. She also leads DFG-funded projects in the issue area of business and human rights and is Research Associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva. Prior to her time at the MPIL, she has held positions as deputy professor for Transnational Governance at the Technical University of Darmstadt, project leader at the Institute for Political Sciences at the University of Giessen, postdoctoral fellow at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences and postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Development and Decent Work at the University of Kassel. Janne Mende has held visiting positions at the WZB – Berlin Social Science Center, Research Unit Global Governance, the School of Global Studies in Gothenburg, the Danish Institute for Human Rights in Copenhagen, the Research Centre Human Rights at the University of Vienna and the New School for Social Research in New York, among others.
F. Richard Georgi is a Senior Research Fellow in the project since 2022. His research and educational background includes a PhD in Peace and Development from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and a Diplom in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. He held positions as contract researcher for the German Institute for Human Rights and as human rights observer in Mexico. In his doctoral thesis, he investigated Colombian human rights defenders as important norm entrepreneurs navigating a violent political reality in-between the end of the armed conflict with the former rebel group FARC-EP and the deferred promise of peace. He did so by combining participant observations, interviews, and document analysis through the lens of discourse theory. F. Richard Georgi has researched, taught, and published on human rights from an interdisciplinary perspective, including activism and political mobilization, peace and conflict, de-/postcolonial studies, and feminist methodologies.
Marcel Frentzel has been a student assistant in the project since March 2023. He was already a student assistant in the previous DFG project "Business Actors beyond Public and Private: Authority, Legitimacy and Responsibility in the United Nations Human Rights Regime" from 2018-2021. Since 2019, he is studying "Democracy and Governance" in the Master's program at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. He completed his bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy at the University of Kassel in 2019. His research interests are in the areas of democratic theory, international political theory and postcolonial theory.
