Complicity and Entanglement

In relation to our current research on „Law in protest; Transnational Struggles for Corporate Liability”, I would like to discuss contemporary attempts to allocate responsibility in globally entangled situations of harm. We observe many social struggles that posit that current institutions of legal responsibility do not reflect how global value chains connect actors, places and jurisdictions, shaped as these institutions are by the methodological nationalism of the Westphalian model. What unites the attempts to turn new perceptions of moral obligation into legal obligations is that they renegotiate mediate responsibility: actions and omissions which enable (rather than directly cause) situations of damage and hurt move more to the centre of claims.
I explore such attempts to allocate responsibility, focussing on the employment of notions of mediate responsibility, such as complicity and aiding and abetting. These provide tools to address the enabling roles of actors in constituting processes that result in harm. I am interested in the distinctions made between mediate and immediate responsibility, and the choice of addressee: states or corporations. These distinctions and choices challenge us to reconsider our (legal) responses to global ‘entanglement’, possibly taking cues from other normative orders for the reformulation of norms of responsibility.