The Corporation

This chapter offers a TWAIL-inspired introduction to the corporation, a legal construct operating in the global political economy, at times an object and subject of international law. Part A of this chapter describes, through texts by key TWAIL authors and their predecessors, how (metropolitan) corporations shaped early modern law, through their role in European ‘exploration’, plunder and colonization of most of the Global South. A key aspect is the corporate enslavement of, and trade in upwards of 13 million Africans which laid the basis for today’s racialized global capitalism. We review some TWAIL (-aligned) writing on the corporation in the global political economy. Part B of this chapter focuses on the continuation of the corporation’s historical role today and how this is enabled in particular through background rules. It describes, through the example of the OECD’s involvement in corporate governance reform, how the Turkish economy has been opened up to predatory (‘neocolonial’) foreign investment. It places this example in the context of broader World Bank and IMF involvement in Third World and so-called ‘Emerging Market’ economies in the service of western capital, through the vehicle of the corporation. Finally, a short Part C outlines various forms of resistance against such corporate neo- and recolonialisation, highlighting Balakrishnan Rajagopal’s claim, that it is easier to organise resistance against, for instance, a dam than against the background norms that are as powerful, all the more insidious, and invisible to most people. A key task for TWAIL scholars therefore, it is posited, is to unearth, make visible and offer challenge to the background norms structuring contemporary corporate capitalism. Ultimately, however, we should draw TWAIL’s critique to its logical conclusion and seek to build alternative structures of ordering, production, and justice, from the ground up.