Legal responsibility in an entangled world

Abstract

Responsibility and accountability in entangled global relations are negotiated across jurisdictional boundaries, localities and scales of legality. In this special issue, we trace struggles for corporate accountability from extraction sites in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru to an abandoned asbestos factory in Italy. We enquire into the gap between the legal institutions which govern attributions of responsibility in procedural, tort and corporate laws, lived experiences of harm connected to transnational business activities and moral expectations of responsibility in global relations. In the struggles for justice discussed in this special issue, we detect potential ways of rethinking ascriptions of responsibility to reflect the deep entanglements of our economies.