What are the common causes for the rise and decline of great powers in the past? What conditions were important in sustaining their international power, and what conditions eventually eroded their primacy?

Human rights have traditionally been viewed as being of concern to governments only. The BHR discussion challenges this traditional, state-centric view and provides reasons why businesses ought to have human rights responsibilities, too. Such reasons or justifications can be formulated from an ethical, legal, and even a more pragmatic, managerial point of view. From an ethical perspective, the chapter shows why businesses have obligations beyond profit-maximization and why human rights obligations are among such responsibilities. It lays particular emphasis on the power and authority of corporations as a possible foundation. From a legal perspective, the chapter addresses the question of whether multinational corporations have international legal personality and assesses to what extent corporate human rights obligations can be derived from international human rights law. From a pragmatic perspective, the social license to operate and the so-called business case for human rights responsibilty are explored. The chapter concludes with some reflections on general objections against corporate human rights responsibility.

This chapter explores the relationship between labor activism along global supply chains and labor politics in China. In particular, it investigates the extent to which Chinese workers have been involved in transnational labor networks, and the nature of their involvement. To date there is no systematic documentation of Chinese labor involvement in transnational campaigns, let alone campaigns specifically involving supply chains, in part because the repression of workers and activists by the authoritarian state presents challenges for empirical research. Nevertheless, this chapter offers an original analysis of five global union federations’ inclusion of Chinese labor in their transnational activities. The analysis reveals three categories of global unions’ engagement with Chinese workers or companies: (1) direct cooperation with Chinese workers, (2) solidarity actions on behalf of Chinese workers, and (3) campaigns on behalf of non-Chinese workers employed by Chinese companies. These findings provide a starting point that can inform future research on the relationship between global supply chains, transnational labor alliances, and the politics of workers’ rights in China.

Chapter 1 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in democracies, distinguishing between authoritarian and democratic coercion. Under authoritarian rule, the primary purpose of coercion is to keep the leader in power, and it is deployed with few constraints. In democracies, where governments must place checks on their own power, coercion ought to be deployed primarily to provide security for the citizenry rather than to serve the interests of the leader, constrained by the rule of law, and subject to external accountability. I disaggregate coercion along three dimensions: the extent to which coercion is governed by law or is applied arbitrarily; the strength of external accountability mechanisms; and whether coercion primarily serves leaders’ interests or to protect citizens. I demonstrate that police reform to promote democratic coercion has been relatively rare in democratic Latin America, even as rising crime and violence made security a salient electoral issue. I assess the problem posed by the endurance of authoritarian coercion for democracies and situate this institutional persistence within the structural power of the police, which leads politicians to engage in accommodation with the police, an exchange relationship that creates entrenched interests that favor institutional persistence.

Chapter 3 probes why São Paulo State’s police have yet to undergo comprehensive structural reform in the decades since Brazil’s democratic transition. Brazil’s transition entailed considerable military reforms in accordance with democratic principles but no comparable effort to reform the country’s police forces. I illustrate how the state’s Military Police leveraged its control over coercion to cultivate structural power vis-à-vis civilian political leaders, through both the selective provision of security in politically beneficial ways and the strategic withdrawal of service. The chapter describes how the Military Police succeeded in constraining policy options available to politicians, and how politicians benefited from accommodating the police. These conditions raised the threshold for police reform in São Paulo over the last three decades, favoring institutional persistence despite the prevalence of widespread extrajudicial killings. I show how the fragmentation of societal preferences over policing and security - rooted in differences in citizens’ experiences with police along lines of race, class, and geography - has yielded little electoral incentive for politicians to enact reform. Instead, a large segment of São Paulo’s citizens demanding weakened legal restrictions on the police’s use of coercion with little external accountability have provided a constituency for politicians favoring authoritarian coercion.

Chapter 2 introduces a two-stage theory of institutional continuity and reform, laying out how societal preferences over the distribution of protection and repression shape politicians’ decisions between the status quo of authoritarian coercion and reform to promote democratic coercion. Far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to either maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or undertake police reform both result from ordinary democratic politics. I argue that, even under the constraints posed by the structural power of police, shifts in the convergence of societal preferences over policing and security and a robust political opposition can serve as key drivers of reform by raising the costs to the incumbent of not reforming the police. The theory yields two key predictions. When societal preferences over policing and security are fragmented, politicians have incentives to pursue accommodation with the police, wherein they grant police greater autonomy in exchange for cooperation in the selective distribution of coercion. This favors the persistence of institutional weakness and authoritarian patterns of coercion. On the other hand, incumbents are likely to pursue democratic police reform when societal preferences converge and when they face an electoral threat from a robust political opposition.