Quick Take

What’s on the Minds of Young Human Rights Scholars

September 6, 2024

Annually since 2016, young human rights scholars gather to share their research and ambitions at a conference organized by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Institute for Business Ethics at the University of St Gallen, the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights at Geneva University’s Geneva School of Economics and Management, and the Business and Human Rights Journal.

The BHR Young Researchers Summit (YRS) attracts more than 60 applications from which Professor Florian Wettstein and I select the most promising dozen or so PhD projects.

The BHR field has developed rapidly in academia and practice in the past decade. The adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (GPs) in 2011 sparked myriad academic publications. Today, new human rights due diligence legislation in the European Union is creating further momentum for academic research.

In the first few years after the adoption of the GPs, the majority of young scholars focused on interpreting and applying the principles in different industries and geographies, examining the interplay between the soft law norms of the GPs and hard law.

In a second phase, scholars increasingly began to critically reflect on the GPs. They questioned whether the GPs will alter corporate behavior, and their work often anticipated a future in which soft law GPs would be replaced by legislation. But the young scholars also started identifying limits of legislation and highlighted additional factors that are critical for integrating the GPs effectively into business practice.

Most recently, scholars are increasingly interested in assessing the actual human rights performance of companies. The question is no longer whether but how companies can meet legal and non-legal human rights expectations. While most companies are currently concerned about complying with legal reporting requirements of the EU’s corporate sustainability reporting directive, the work of emerging scholars often already goes a step further. They ask whether current human rights due diligence measures result in the desired outcome—namely, more respect for the human rights of workers and communities.

Generally, recent YRS applicants have a broader disciplinary background, and they often conduct empirical studies to assess whether companies are altering business practices to respect human rights in their operations and their supply chains. They explore the effectiveness question in challenging contexts, e.g. doing business in autocratic regimes, conflict situations, or the informal economy, to highlight the implementation challenges on the ground.

We hope that this shift from procedural concerns to an interest in measuring impacts is a harbinger of developments in corporate practice.

Over the past nine years, our young scholars alumni network of more than 100 former participants have taken positions in academia, civil society, and the private sector. This group will contribute to shaping the business and human rights field for decades to come. They also will help us catalyze the network we are building among business schools featuring human rights in their curricula.