Transitional justice has tended to be focused on the truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence for victims of state human rights atrocities. But what about the involvement of economic actors in those atrocities? This paper will track the use of transitional justice mechanisms in that area, to probe a) when accountability has occurred, b) what kind of accountability mechanisms have been used, c) where and for what types of crimes, and d) to what outcomes in terms of transitional justice goals. The talk will draw on an original data base of cases, the Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice (CATJ) data base and a forthcoming book at Cambridge University Press.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College. She is currently working on several projects related to her research focus on responses to past atrocity. Together with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal Bermúdez, she has a forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press) on corporate accountability and transitional justice. Building on her book on confessions of perpetrators of state violence, Unsettling Accounts (Duke University Press), she is working on a new project on confessions to past violence by the armed revolutionary left (Left Unsettled). With support from the Newton Fund for research in Mexico and Brazil, she is working on a project on contemporary disappearances in countries that have transitioned from authoritarian rule and armed conflict. In addition to the Newton Fund, she gratefully acknowledges the support for these projects from the University of Minnestoa Human Rights Program (where she is a senior researcher), ESRC, AHRC, the British Academy, Leverhulme, and the Open Society Foundation.