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The chapter examines the role of the private sector in the human rights violations that occurred during the 2019 Chilean social protests. It discusses corporate involvement, the role of courts in accountability efforts, the most effective legal framework, and the legal obstacles. The chapter contributes to understanding the legal opportunities and challenges that civil society mobilisation and legal innovators face to overcome the force of veto players in current corporate accountability affairs. The chapter first lays out the human rights standards applicable to private actors in Chile in particular. It uses international human rights standards, comparative law, and Chilean legislation to establish private actors’ specific human rights obligations. The second part uses studies on transitional justice and corporate complicity in order to map the patterns of business involvement in current human rights violations. This empirical section draws on qualitative research to investigate how economic actors from different sectors have participated in the human rights crisis. The third part applies the legal standards examined in the first section of the chapter to the patterns of behaviour observed in the second section. It concludes by discussing innovative legal strategies to make economic actors accountable for their involvement in the human rights crisis. 

Chapter Two explores Mississippi’s history from post-Reconstruction to the summer of 1963. Understanding the events that took place just prior to the Freedom Vote, both regionally and nationally, places the event in an arc of protest and counter-violence. Recognizing its place in this trajectory further solidifies the significance of the tactical evolutions of social protest occurring within the Civil Rights Movement.

Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19^th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.

Environmental activism has intensified across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few decades, focusing primarily on environmental issues that affect public health and livelihoods. While intrusive security states limit information and stifle civil society, expanding educational opportunities, growing cities, and new means of communication have enabled environmental activism. This includes small-scale, informal, and localized activism to demand access to natural resources and environmental services; the spread of environmental nongovernmental organizations; and the coordinated popular resistance campaign that includes direct action, media outreach, and lobbying. State elites and official media often portray environmental mobilization as a threat to national security and state integrity, but sometimes tolerate it as an informal enforcement mechanism to pressure polluting firms and nonresponsive officials. As elsewhere, state and corporate actors also increasingly deploy their own discourses and interventions, generally focused on technocratic solutions rather than questions of political economy and environmental justice.

This chapter examines how ideas about forest management changed from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries in response to the expanding idea of “naturalness.” In the nineteenth century, foresters dominated scientific research on forest systems. Some foresters began to criticize forestry management schemes because of their aesthetic and biological consequences. These criticisms expanded in the first half of the twentieth century as researchers in the fields of hydrology, wildlife biology, and ecology undermined key assumptions about forest conservation. The expansion of clear-felling as a harvesting method after World War II fueled public conflicts over the management of state-controlled forests in countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and India. Deforestation caused by economic growth in developing countries created controversy as well. In response to social pressure, governments in many countries began to set aside large native forests as protected areas that would preserve the biological and ecological integrity of forests. The decline of harvesting from protected areas was offset by the increase in plantation-growth timber domestically and globally.

The discourse on racial liberalism at mid-century involved the debate over antisemitism, made more urgent by Hitler’s rise in Germany. Born Jewish but largely assimilated, Hobson protested the complicity of liberals with antisemitism in her post–WW II best seller, which featured a gentile journalist passing for Jewish to write his expose. This novel’s reliance on a discourse of empathy ties it closely back to Stowe’s and looks forward to the philosophy at the heart of Lee’s Mockingbird. Here the protagonist, Philip Greene, passes as a Jew to learn how antisemitism feels. Meanwhile his liberal girlfriend hesitates to rent her cottage in a restricted neighborhood to Philip’s Jewish war buddy. Both protagonists exhibit the limitations of liberalism as they confront systemic as well as emotional biases that threaten their idealism.