This panel examines workplace rights violations in Brazil and beyond from the standpoint of rights-holders, the workers who experience violence, harassment, and structural forms of workplace abuse, rather than from the standpoint of corporate or state duty alone. Political science has paid limited attention to how rights-holders navigate, contest, and reshape the governance architecture built around the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), issued in 2011, and its three pillars of protect, respect, and remedy. This panel asks what that architecture looks like when analyzed through the political agency of those it is meant to protect.
The panel is particularly attentive to two ongoing normative processes that reconfigure this architecture in real time: the UN treaty negotiations on a legally binding instrument on business and human rights, currently at the intergovernmental working group stage, and the international debate over ratification of ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment, still pending in several states including Brazil. We invite papers examining how rights-holders exercise voice and build political pressure within and around these processes, including through labor organizing, civil society data production, strategic litigation, and legislative advocacy.
Papers may also examine how governance gaps, on the state side and on the corporate due diligence side, shape whether rights-holders can access remedy in practice, and how power asymmetries between workers and organizations condition that access. The panel particularly welcomes papers with an intersectional lens on how gender, race and class shape which rights-holders are heard and which remain structurally silenced, and papers grounded in original empirical work, including participatory or survey-based methods that center rights-holders' own accounts. This call connects to an ongoing research agenda on institutional harassment in the business and human rights field, developed by a Brazil-based research group working across three axes aligned with the UNGPs pillars. Global South perspectives are of particular interest.
