In the 1990s, the humanitarian charities finalised their entry into the development mainstream. They became partners in a humanitarian-development complex associated with military intervention, liberal governance and permanent emergency. As they followed in the wake of more powerful agencies, they also adopted the rhetoric and discourses of official aid. Following the collapse of both communism and apartheid, human rights were confirmed as the guiding principle of international governance. Charity regulation had previously prevented the advocacy of human rights. But after the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1993, the charities all signed up to a ‘rights-based approach’. This was a human rights framework more individualised, more focused on basic rights and less targeted at the inequalities arising out of structural injustice. Rights allowed the humanitarians to depoliticise their work and for charity to be accepted as a part of the common sense solution to poverty at home and abroad. This was a type of charitable humanitarianism that emerged ‘after empire’ and which was palatable to both governments and mass donating publics.

Suicide is a global phenomenon, with implications for HICs and LMICs alike, bec,ause of interconnectedness. Social injustice increases societies’ suicide risk and it is easily and frequently exported. Suicide is preventable but not always individually. Suicide prediction is difficult or impossible, so those measures that effect everyone work best. Hence assuring good quality, timely mental health coverage for the whole population is important. Those with the least resources must be targeted, as they are at greatest risk..

The concept of Humanity is defined as the character of the human species, and it is distinguished from other similar concepts: humankind, humanness, human rights, human obligations, human dignity, and human mutual love. Humanity encompasses the spirit of general reason, and Marcus Aurelius is cited as a prime example of this spirit. The purpose of social and state institutions, of the arts and sciences is to humanize. This is borne out by Lucretius, Homer, Shaftesbury, Lessing, Diderot, and Swift, and citations of their works are given as testimony. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti is read as an example of how morality is realized in the theatre. The chapter closes with a poem by Ludwig Gleim as an example of human goodness.

This chapter explores processes of legalisation in the context of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in extractive industries. It analyses three major regimes: the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), launched in 2002 to curb the trade in conflict diamonds; the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global standard promoting accountability in natural resource governance; and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs), adopted in 2000 to address abuses by private security forces protecting corporate assets. These initiatives display a distinctive focus on implementation. Participants may receive substantial guidance and support to assist with compliance. State and non-state actors contribute to the production of guidelines, toolkits and performance indicators designed to assist corporations in rule implementation on the ground and in specific contexts. When violations occur, members may support the offending party in implementing reforms before resorting to sanctions.

The book examines the various arenas in which actors are making – and breaking – the rules in business and human rights. It advances a framework for analysing these developments by adapting the liberal institutionalist concept of legalisation articulated in Kenneth Abbott et al.’s article ‘The Concept of Legalization’. Applied in the transnational context, the classic framework appears incomplete: it omits a crucial dimension – implementation – which operates alongside obligation, precision and delegation. The empirical chapters in this book reveal that efforts toward implementation are often pursued with the aim of strengthening one or more of the other dimensions over time. In such cases, actors play the long game: they may accept lower levels of obligation, precision or delegation in the short term, anticipating that early attention to implementation will enhance these dimensions in the longer run. Beyond business and human rights, this revised framework may also illuminate regulatory dynamics in transnational fields such as climate governance, national security, and anti-trafficking.

This chapter surveys the international legal framework governing transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights. It begins with a brief history of the corporation, traces the rise of transnational corporate power since the 1970s, and offers a definition of the TNC. It then outlines the various ways in which corporate activities can adversely affect human rights, drawing on some of the most notorious incidents of recent decades. The chapter highlights the persistent difficulty of regulating corporations at the international level and describes the current regime under which states bear primary responsibility for preventing and remedying human rights abuses within their territories, including those committed by businesses. Since 2010, several states have introduced modern slavery legislation requiring companies to conduct due diligence on their operations and supply chains.

This chapter lays out the book’s argument in two parts. First, it first develops the concept of self-determination as understood by state and non-state actors in the Global South to apply to the legitimate exercise of power in the international system. Rather than requiring strict sovereignty and exclusion of outside actors, self-determination is about the nature of cooperation and international involvement. It requires that people, through their governments, be able to domestically affirm international rules and to meaningfully participate in their enforcement. The second part of this chapter explains how establishing regional organizations as an authority over issue areas can be a strategy for realizing self-determination and why, in the case of human rights, it necessitated compromising on the norm of non-interference. This strategy is effective at deterring pressure from Western governments because it combines and appeals to widely held beliefs about the legitimacy of self-rule with beliefs about the importance of exercising power through international organizations.

Why have regional organizations become authorities over human rights and international intervention, and what explains the differences in regional authority across different regions? Why did leaders in some parts of the Global South go from rejecting any interference to arguing for the central role of regional organizations in international interference? This chapter introduces the central questions addressed by this book and provides an overview of its core argument, focusing on the creation of new regional authority at one important moment: the emergence of regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This was the first time when leaders in the Global South changed from arguing for complete non-interference to arguing that legitimate interference should be carried out by or with the involvement of regional organizations. They did so as a strategy of subtle resistance to new challenges to self-determination, in the form of economic enforcement of human rights by Western governments. In regions targeted by this enforcement, leaders responded by establishing their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting regional interference for the first time.

This chapter explores implications of the argument made in this book for other areas of international relations scholarship and for contemporary international politics, with regional authority and self-determination continuing to occupy an important place in the international politics of the Global South. It considers how incorporating the importance of self-determination, and the idea of regional organizations as a means of realizing it, can provide more complete understandings of contemporary political phenomena. I discuss how the argument in this book sheds light on the Global South’s dissatisfaction with liberal norms and institutions, the openness of democratic states in the Global South to cooperation with illiberal powers, and present-day dynamics of regionalism, including the creation of “new” regions and the growth of “authoritarian” regional organizations.

Where the 1970s and 1980s was a period of dramatic change in the use of regional organizations and attitudes towards the norm of non-interference in Latin America and Africa, the Middle East followed a very different trajectory. The changes in global norms and advocacy surrounding human rights in the 1970s coincided with the Middle East’s increased importance in Western foreign policy and the explosion of oil wealth in the region. Because of this, Western governments did not attempt to enforce human rights in this region, and as a result, leaders in the region made no changes towards establishing regional authority over human rights. Instead, the emergence of the human rights movement in the 1970s had the effect of short-circuiting earlier advances towards creating human rights institutions. It was only in the early 2000s, following the start of the Global War on Terror, that the Arab League finally began to develop new human rights institutions, and these institutions have been weaker and subject to greater state control. In contrast to Latin America and Africa, regional human rights institutions in the Middle East represent a straightforward attempt to deflect international pressure.

Latin America was the first and most intense target of the imposition of economic enforcement of human rights. The strategy of establishing regional organizations as authorities over human rights emerged in response to these new enforcement policies. This meant greatly expanding the authority of the Organization of American States and, for the first time, allowing it to interfere in member states’ internal affairs to enforce human rights. This strategy emerged first as an authoritarian survival strategy put forward by the Chilean government in response to unprecedented challenges to its domestic behaviors. However, democratic leaders in the region transformed it into a strategy involving real enforcement once economic pressure spread to the entire region. As this chapter demonstrates, the idea that regional organizations have special authority over human rights had not been taken for granted prior to this, as human rights were not understood as an issue that could be altered to fit local contexts. Instead, Latin American leaders–including democracies and leaders supporting human rights enforcement–argued forcefully for this new authority.

This chapter addresses some of the many ways that unilateral coercive measures run counter to international human rights law. Such measures may directly compromise the human rights to health, education, economic and social rights, and the right to development as well as sustainable development goals. The chapter addresses the expanding practice of the use of unilateral sanctions, provides an assessment of the possibility of imposing unilateral sanctions as countermeasures or retorsions, and provides an overview of the humanitarian impact of different types of sanctions on different categories of human rights. It looks at the recent developments in sanctioning practice. In particular, as targeted sanctions are usually presented as a good alternative to the comprehensive ones, minimizing humanitarian impact of unilateral measures, the chapter addresses the grounds for targeted unilateral sanctions, assesses their impact on the human rights of directly designated individuals, as well as other people and targeted populations in general. It concludes that listings of individuals regularly run counter to the right to due process. Additionally, most recently unilateral sanctions have compromised internet access, which in turn undermines access to many essential services.