Deadly Colonial Ethics: Development Policy-Speak and Corporate Responsibility

The emergence of the corporate code of conduct for human rights in the late 1990s represents a privatization of human rights unanticipated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or by Third Worldist efforts to harness human rights to the taming of corporate power in the 1970s. The chapter traces the trajectory of peasant struggles at what might be considered the birthplace of the contemporary configuration of voluntary corporate responsibility for human rights: British Petroleum’s Colombian oilfields. Drawing a project that seeks to recover historical memory of what took place, the chapter argues that voluntary corporate responsibility sustains a moral discourse that equates resistance with irrationality or subversion, thus rationalizing death in the name of “development.”