2013 Theses Doctoral

Atrocity, Commerce and Accountability: Corporate Responsibility for International Crimes

Stewart, James Graham

In recent decades, the prospect of holding corporations and their representatives responsible for international crimes has emerged as an important component of a number of interlinked fields. While these ideas have become widely acknowledged, the scope of the relationship between commerce and international criminal justice has remained poorly understood among theorists and seldom implemented in practice. In large part, both these phenomena result from a lack of familiarity with the diverse fields one must traverse in order to speak with any degree of confidence about the role of international criminal justice as a means of regulating globalized markets. In what follows, I introduce how my work for the JSD has explored three different but necessary areas of law that underpin these analyses. Specifically, this final essay provides a narrative of how this work emerged for me, the normative hypotheses that have informed my JSD, and the three core projects I have undertaken in international criminal law, the theory of complicity, and corporate criminal liability to move this agenda forward.