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STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP IN HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIAN BUSINESS PRACTICES · 2026 EDITION

Course Revision Companion

Last updated on 11 August 2026. Everything on this page comes from the course as it was actually taught — the slides we used in class and the course's own reading notes, nothing imported from elsewhere.

A note on how this material was made. This revision companion relies heavily on AI capabilities: it was produced through LLM-based processing of the professor's own teaching notes, texts, presentations and course materials. Human revision has been applied, but with material of this kind the usual discretion is advised in every situation — double-check references, quotations and the connections drawn between ideas against the original readings before you rely on them. And if anything leaves you in doubt, reach out to the professor directly; that is always a good use of a question.
How to use this document. This page is designed to support your revision, on the simple principle that revision is more effective when it begins with the areas in which you have already shown an interest and with the questions that are currently engaging you. The page is divided into three sections, and you do not need to read all of them in one sitting. The first section starts with you — beginning with the orientation quiz you completed on the first day of the course, and then moving on to the case territories that arose from the portfolio topics selected in this class. The second section goes through the whole course day by day, with a short self-test at the end of each day so that you can check your understanding as you go. The third section is an index of the ideas that kept reappearing across the days, together with a note showing where each idea can be found. As a genuine suggestion: begin by reading your own territory, since that is where your attention currently lies. After that, read one territory that is not yours. Reading someone else's territory is not extra work — it is exactly the kind of shift that shows an examiner the difference between really understanding a course and having merely memorised one part of it. Every part of the page stays readable at all times; any highlighting you switch on later is laid over the text as a suggestion, not a filter.
The tools you played with, all in one place. Over the thirteen days you didn't only listen — you answered, negotiated, simulated and voted. All of those tools are still online, and revisiting them is one of the most pleasant ways to revise, because each one holds a memory of how a concept felt in practice.

Part 1 · Revision material organised around you

This first section offers you revision material in two complementary ways: starting from the orientation you received on the first day, and starting from the case you chose for your portfolio. Both routes lead into the same course — they simply enter it from different doors — so use whichever feels more natural to you, or both.

1a · The quiz you answered on the first day

On the first day of the course you completed a short quiz: fourteen direct questions, each asking you to choose between two things you might genuinely value. The point was never to test you — it was to surface your preferred interests, the kinds of roles you naturally gravitate towards, and the way you currently see this field. At the end, the quiz gave you an orientation. You can retake it here (humanitsim.pages.dev/compass) whenever you like, or simply recall the result from that first morning. This section offers revision material connected to each of those orientations. Two points are worth noting before you read your own. The first is that the orientation was never a fixed category — it was a snapshot of your inclinations on one particular day, and a course of this kind is designed to move people, so it is entirely possible that you would answer differently today. If you retake the quiz and the result has changed, that change is itself worth five minutes of reflection: read both orientations, the old one and the new one, and ask yourself what the course did to you. The second point is that every orientation below comes with a stretch — the part of the course that this set of interests tends to overlook. The stretch is described gently, but please take it seriously: it is usually where the most valuable revision hides.

If you wish, you can select your orientation here, and the page will then show your route. Along the page, your orientation card, the days that form your path, and the case territories that suit your interests will all be clearly highlighted; the other items will remain visible but less prominent. Your stretch days will be shown in a warmer colour as a friendly reminder. You are always free to change your selection or remove it.
One thing matters more than the choice itself: nothing on this page is ever hidden or locked by that choice. The whole text stays fully readable from top to bottom, whichever orientation you pick. The highlighting works as suggested emphasis only — a supplementary layer of support for your reading, pointing to a good place to begin, never to a place where you must stop.
The Advocate
Your answers to the quiz tended to favour voice — the view that when a person's rights are being violated, someone should speak up about it clearly and loudly, even when speaking up is inconvenient.
If that description matches your answers, Days 1 and 2 are your foundations, and they deserve a slow read: they explain where rights actually come from, and they carry Arendt's difficult question about who gets to claim rights at all — a question every advocate eventually meets in practice. Day 5 will give you a sentence you are likely to use for the rest of your working life: that business in a conflict zone is never neutral. And Day 10 is, in a real sense, your day, because it is entirely about who is heard, who is allowed to challenge a decision, and what actually changes because of the challenge.
Where to stretch. The section of the course which these interests tend to overlook is Day 3, the day dealing with numbers. Advocacy that is unable to deal with measurement is rejected in every boardroom it enters—not since it is incorrect—but because it can be ignored. If you become thoroughly familiar with the indicators so as to be able to argue about them, then your position will become much more difficult to dismiss.
When you reach the case territories below, begin with business in conflict, labour rights, and access and development — those are the territories where advocates' portfolios are usually found.
The Steward
Your responses showed a tendency towards care — an interest in protecting people and resources, and in keeping the organisation running without causing harm in the process.
Days 5 and 6 will feel familiar to you. They treat heightened due diligence and the risk register not as paperwork but as an operating system — which is exactly how your answers approached an organisation. Day 9 then shows what stewardship looks like when it reaches board level, with real duties and real records, and Day 12 asks what careful stewardship becomes when the old canon meets very new technology.
Where to stretch. The day which might tempt you to regard as belonging to someone else is in fact Day 8, and that would be a real mistake. Stewardship relies on having the right structures in place, and on Day 8 the course reaches its main point of confrontation — Wettstein's claim that companies have positive duties opposed to Choudhury's showing that corporate law silently establishes the alternative default. It makes clear, without placing the blame on anyone, why good stewards tend so frequently to fail in companies that are poorly constructed.
In the case territories below, begin with environment and disasters and with supply-chain due diligence.
The Strategist
Your answers focused on the long-term picture: they took account of positions and leverage, and worked out what the other person at the table actually wanted before deciding what to offer them.
Day 4 will reward you first: it teaches forum determination — the strategic question of whether a case has too few fora, exactly one, or too many, and which cause of action can carry it — and why cases live or die on that analysis. Day 7's simulation and Day 10's Nordhavn negotiation are where your way of working fits best, and you will probably enjoy them; let yourself also be examined by them, because both are designed to reveal what a strategy costs the people who are not at the table. Day 9 shows the governance machinery any strategy has to survive.
Where to stretch. Your turn is on Day 11; at this moment people are drawing up rules that will outlive any cleverness and a strategist who ignores the rule-writing table is planning brilliantly for the wrong decade.
In the case territories below, begin with business in conflict and with leadership and governance.
The Operator
Your answers showed a preference for action — the idea that the value of any plan depends on what actually happens, and that someone has to make it happen.
Day 6 is your day, and it says so almost explicitly: due diligence there is treated as an operating system rather than a policy document, which is exactly how your answers approached it. Day 7 introduces deprivation cost — the human price of relief arriving late — which turns delivery speed, the concern your answers kept returning to, into an ethical quantity. And Day 11's deployment exercise is operations under the hardest constraints the course can build.
Where to stretch. The period during which you carry out the stretch constitutes the first two days of the course. The rules which you follow have origins and explanations behind them, and there is a tendency to omit them in order to get on to the practical days. Please don't do this: it is precisely by knowing the reason why a rule exists that one can be distinguished from a bureaucrat, and this knowledge alters the way in which you are able to act when the rulebook is no longer available.
In the case territories below, begin with environment and disasters and with supply-chain due diligence.
The Investigator
Your answers gave first priority to establishing the facts — to finding out what actually happened before any discussion of what those events mean begins.
Day 3 belongs to you almost entirely: whether we can trust the numbers, the difference between detecting more cases and there actually being more cases, and the uncomfortable finding that the major ESG ratings agree with one another at a correlation of about 0.3. Day 4 shows you which kinds of evidence survive a courtroom, and Day 6 gives you the risk register's most honest column — the evidence gap.
Where to stretch. Your stretch is Day 10. Evidence that never reaches an audience changes nothing, however good it is. Verification needs a route into real decisions, and that route is engagement — the part of the work investigators most often leave to others.
In the case territories below, start with supply-chain due diligence and then move on to forced labour.
The Communicator
Your answers tended to focus on the story itself — on the fact that how something is presented has a major influence on what people do about it afterwards.
Day 7 will give you your most important reflection, even if it is a little painful: the campaign laboratory and the Brand Aid materials examine the industry that profits from exactly the kind of talent your answers displayed, treating that industry with respect but without mercy. Day 8 focuses on the gap between what a leader says and what their organisation actually does. Day 10 shows disclosure — which is what telling amounts to once it becomes an institutional obligation.
Where to stretch. Your stretch is Day 3. Behind every honest message there has to be a mechanism and a metric — something that actually works, measured in a way that could fail. Learn to check before you tell, and your communication gains the one quality no technique can fake, which is being right.
In the case territories below, focus first on access and development, and then on AI and digital rights.
The Appraiser
Your answers showed a willingness to take responsibility for judgment — to assess a piece of work, give it a score, and state clearly whether it succeeded — because someone has to.
Day 3's indicator discipline will be the most familiar material for you, and Day 6's risk register is the tool you will use most. Day 10 gives you the questions you may end up using constantly — the verification questions: who checks, how often, and who sees the results. And Day 11 hands you the frontier, with a detail you will appreciate: in the AI simulation, the function that quietly went missing was 'Measure'. The course is telling you that this kind of attention is both needed and scarce.
Where to stretch. It is rather surprising that your period begins at the very start — on Days 1 and 2. Each measurement has a purpose which has been selected by someone, and the foundations make clear what the figures are ultimately for and what they will never be able to capture. An appraiser who has read Arendt assesses things differently.
In the case territories below, start with supply-chain due diligence and then move on to AI and digital rights.

1b · Revision material organised around your portfolio case

The eight territories come from the portfolio cases this class actually chose — the companies and situations you each selected for your own assignments — no abstract examples, just the real ground the group works on. Whenever a question below says 'your case' or 'the company', it means exactly that: the company or situation at the centre of your own portfolio. Find your own territory, read through its section, and try the questions out loud. Then follow one borrowing into another person's territory: that is not extra work — it is how examiners tell the difference between depth of understanding and simple memorisation.

Business in conflict & atrocity complicity
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Unocal, Kiobel, Lafarge Syria, Meta/Myanmar, Telenor Myanmar, or arms exports. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 4Day 5Day 6Day 9Day 11
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Kolieb (2020) — Human-rights law alone is not enough in conflict: international humanitarian law is non-derogable, applies extraterritorially, and binds persons directly, which closes the liability gap that Day 4 leaves open.
Joseph (2004) with Dodge (2019) — Unocal made corporations defendants under the ATS through knowing practical assistance, and the Supreme Court then contracted the ATS by avoidance; together, Joseph and Dodge explain why the forum in your case kept moving.
UNDP (2022) with Traoré & Cirimwami (2024) — Diligence doubles in conflict, because a business has impacts on people and on the conflict itself, and business is 'never neutral'; when conduct diligence reaches its limit, the honest options are suspension or disengagement. Read the two texts as one argument: first the method, then the exit.
Kobrin (2009) — The Talisman case in Sudan is the earliest full statement of this territory's problem: a multinational exercising political authority in a conflict zone with no accountability machinery to match that power. Kobrin also states plainly the question boards still face: if the company exits, does the harm stop, or does it pass to a less scrupulous successor?
Olsen & Bernal-Bermúdez (2023/24) — Over 30% of abuse claims in Latin America are state-enabled, and compliance systems cannot monitor the state that hosts the company; that figure is the evidence behind the phrase 'the conflict won't ignore you'.
Garon (2022) — The legal question is constant from the Zyklon-B trials to algorithmic amplification: what did the company know, and at what point does knowledge create liability? If your case touches platforms, Garon connects it directly to Day 11's material on AI in conflict.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Apply Day 4's forum-determination analysis to your case: too few fora, exactly one, or too many? Which cause of action carries it, and was the decisive question ever actually decided?
  2. What would heightened due diligence have had to find, and by when, to change your case company's course — and would Traoré & Cirimwami's limit have required exit?
  3. Olsen & Bernal-Bermúdez say your perpetrator may be the state itself. What does that do to your company's compliance architecture?
Worth borrowing from the supply-chain disclosure territory
Borrow OECD (2016): the five-step minerals system is your due-diligence chapter 'with plumbing' — trace, respond, audit the chokepoint, report.
Worth borrowing from the ai and digital rights territory
Borrow ICRC (2019): its example of an image classifier mistaking a turtle for a rifle is the checkpoint scenario in automated form. The knowledge standard your cases apply to executives will increasingly have to be applied to systems.
AI, surveillance & digital rights
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Workday/Mobley, Project Maven, GenAI harms, Amazon surveillance, or Safe-City pilots. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 3Day 8Day 10Day 11Day 12
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Fioravante (2024) — Digital washing means that a perception-based business case can be satisfied by managing perception alone; Fioravante's five detector questions — including 'who owns the ethics debate?' — are your first analytical move.
Jones (2023) — Human rights beat the 84+ AI ethics codes on maturity, consensus, and enforcement machinery. Jones attributes the weakness of the ethics codes to a concrete absence: the people affected are not in the bodies that write the codes. It is the same lesson Day 8 teaches about structures installing defaults.
EU AI Act (2024) with Hogan & Lasek-Markey (2024) — The Act's binding risk pyramid names your stack high-risk, but the Act is product-safety law with a military carve-out, and the rights sit in the Act's purposes rather than in its machinery; know both the promise and the ceiling.
NIST AI RMF (2023) — The framework's four functions are GOVERN, MAP, MEASURE, and MANAGE; it is voluntary and sets no substantive floor. In the Day 11 simulation, the Measure function is what quietly went missing — and that weakest point is precisely what an examiner will ask about.
Beduschi (2022) — Anticipatory humanitarian AI is priced by data quality, bias, and consent; when a biased system denies a person registration or aid, it reproduces in automated form the problem Arendt described — a right that cannot be claimed.
Henriksen (2024) — Big Tech humanitarianism runs care and control from one sector; returns are reputation, data, talent, markets. A necessary complication to set against more optimistic accounts.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Take one real responsible-AI statement from your case and run Fioravante's five questions plus the course's sixth: who verifies, at what interval, with what publication rule?
  2. Where exactly does your technology sit in the EU AI Act's pyramid — and does the carve-out trilogy (treaty scope, CSDDD, Art. 2(3)) touch it?
  3. Design the clause set your deployment needs to survive crisis: scope, disclosure, verification, remedy — each with actor, verifier, consequence.
Worth borrowing from the foundations of the course (Days 1–2)
Borrow Arendt (1951): 'the right to have rights' is what your biometric registration case is really about — membership before rights, now decided by a classifier.
Worth borrowing from the forced labour territory
Borrow LeBaron (2021) via WHO (2024): the underpaid data annotators behind large models occupy the same position as garment workers in a supply chain — so value-chain due diligence applies to models in the same way.
Forced labour, trafficking & migrant work
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Finnish wild berries, Qatar 2022, or Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 1Day 2Day 3Day 6Day 9
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
LeBaron (2021) — Sub-poverty wages plus debt are forced labour's recruiting mechanism, yet audits ignore both wages and the buyer's purchasing practices; the buyer manufactures the very risk its own audits then fail to find.
ILO (2019) with Maul (2019) — The Universal Labour Guarantee revives the living-wage floor of 1919 for all workers regardless of contract type, and tripartism explains how such norms travel — and where capture creeps in.
Tyc (2021) — Tyc covers thirty years of the unadopted social clause, which would have made trade access conditional on labour standards and remained stuck between exigibility and protectionism; the enforcement gap in your case has a history.
Choudhury (2023) — Asset partitioning plus shareholder purpose install the instrumental default by law, with Rana Plaza as the emblem; Choudhury explains why your supply chain behaves as it does even under mandatory HRDD.
McCorquodale & Neely (2022) — The directors' oversight duty maps 'almost exactly' onto UNGP 17 due diligence; Antuzis is the case where mistreating workers became the directors' personal problem.
Moyn (2018) — He exempts labour rights from his critique because they build countervailing power rather than distribute charity — which is why he treats them as the part of the rights tradition still able to address inequality.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Apply three ILO forced-labour indicators to your case's established facts: what does each prove, and what can it not prove?
  2. A company in your sector doubles its identified cases. Using Day 3's detection-versus-incidence distinction, argue the good-news and bad-news readings.
  3. Where does LeBaron's audit blind spot sit in your case — and what would an audit have had to inspect to catch what courts or journalists later found?
Worth borrowing from the supply-chain disclosure territory
Borrow Dobbin & Kalev's surgeon test: outcomes per group, not initiative counts — the audit rule for every 'S' metric your case's company publishes.
Worth borrowing from the conflict and complicity territory
Borrow Lubanga and Joseph: where forced labour meets conflict, the individual-liability route stays open after the corporate forum closes.
Labour rights & freedom of association
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Samsung Chennai or the Beed district workers. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 1Day 2Day 6Day 9Day 10
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Maul (2019) — Tripartism regulated worker voice into the legislature itself, and freedom of association is the enabling right because it builds the counter-power that all the other labour standards lean on.
ILO (2019) — Time sovereignty, human-in-command, and the revived wage floor make up the ILO's forward agenda — the agenda the workers in your case are effectively pursuing in the present.
McBarnet (2007) — Responsibility runs beyond law, through law, and for law; Antuzis is beyond-law pressure becoming doctrine, and that may be the path your case is on.
Dobbin & Kalev (2022) — Culprit-correcting programmes backfire, while system redesign with an owned number works; this is the test to apply to every HR initiative your company presents to the union.
Ford, Gillan & Thein (2024) — The NCP system: no teeth, yet 40%+ agreements — and 70% of complaints filed by Northern CSOs for Southern communities. Represented is not present; your workers know the difference.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Why is freedom of association called an enabling right — what concretely does it enable in your case?
  2. Map your company's response onto McBarnet's grid: which moves ran beyond law, which through it, and which were creative compliance?
  3. At which engagement level (consultation / participation / steering) did your case company meet its workers — and what level did the risk deserve?
Worth borrowing from the leadership and governance territory
Borrow Choudhury (2023): before blaming the manager, check what the corporate structure makes rational. Your union-avoidance story may be a purpose-default story.
Worth borrowing from the environment and disaster territory
Borrow the Vestland stress test: stay, pause, re-consult, exit — the same board grammar applies when the pressure is a strike, not a spill.
Environment, health & disaster
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Brumadinho, Braskem Maceió, Tropodo, or EACOP. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 4Day 6Day 9Day 10
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Bradshaw & Ojeda on Vedanta, with Wang (2024) — Vedanta establishes parent-company duty through ordinary negligence, with the company's own sustainability report as Exhibit A; Wang then reverses the perverse incentive to publish less by treating documented diligence as a defence rather than a confession.
Boyle (2012) with Boyd (2011) and Heinämäki (2022) — There are two routes to the environmental right — judges extending existing rights to environmental harm, and constitutions writing new environmental rights — and the sobering arithmetic remains: even fully complied-with procedure still points to about 2.6°C.
Liu & Hoskin (2023) — In Fukushima, a state-sized defendant defeats the whole corporate accountability toolbox, and the claim migrates into inter-state law; test whether the real defendant in your case is reachable at all.
Fan, Shao, Wang & Liang (2024) — Deprivation cost — the human price of relief arriving late — turns disaster response into a matter of contract design; your remedy chapter has an operations-research literature behind it.
GRI (2016) — Stakeholders include the voiceless via proxies; engagement becomes accounting. Publish the list, the exclusion basis, the topics, the responses — your consultation critique, formalized.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Run the Vedanta logic on your case: what did the parent publish, and what duty might it found — under Wang's regime, does the same document defend them?
  2. Build the five-line risk register your case company needed the year before the harm: risk, source, status, involvement, action, evidence gap.
  3. Who in your case could actually have paused the project — and under which clause, verified by whom?
Worth borrowing from the supply-chain disclosure territory
Borrow Nielsen & Villadsen's test — does the language commit to anything measurable? — and apply it to your company's last sustainability report; Vedanta shows where that answer ends up.
Worth borrowing from the ai and digital rights territory
Borrow Beduschi and Pantiris: anticipatory systems, human judgment in the chaotic 72 hours. Your early-warning chapter is being automated as you write.
Supply-chain due diligence & disclosure
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Tony's Chocolonely, H&M, Bestseller, or Kahawa Bora/DRC. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 3Day 5Day 6Day 9Day 10
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Liang & Renneboog (2020) with UNGC/GRI (2018) — ESG ratings correlate at about 0.3 while capital is allocated on the basis of those ratings, and the standard-setters concede the measurement gap from the inside; your numbers chapter starts here.
Eccles & Serafeim (2013) with Dobbin & Kalev (2022) — The trade-off is real, and only innovation on material issues shifts the frontier; counting initiatives proves nothing. Every initiative needs an identified mechanism and a measurable outcome, and without both its effectiveness cannot be demonstrated.
OECD (2016) and OECD (2023) — The OECD guidance sets out five due-diligence steps with practical machinery — trace, respond, audit the chokepoint, report — and the 2023 addition is responsible disengagement, whose own harm must also be weighed.
Martínez San Millán (2021) — Four conflict-minerals instruments are audited: premiums and traceability were gained, while laundering, diversion, and a de facto embargo appeared alongside; the disclosure instruments themselves prohibit nothing, and that is the finding your policy chapter must survive.
Smit et al. (2020) with Principale (2023) — As HRDD hardens into law, 'reasonable' becomes a standard of care filled by actual practice, and the CSDDD fuses that standard into board duty: do, document, publish.
Bartels & Schramade (2024) — Capital is the strongest lever and it's starved of comparable data. Reporting into a vacuum is performance — the investor-side twin of the 0.3 problem.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. For one initiative in your case: name its mechanism, its metric, and what evidence would falsify it.
  2. Apply Martínez San Millán's audit to your case's favourite instrument: what did it actually change, and what did it displace?
  3. Which of your case company's voluntary commitments does the CSDDD harden into board duty — and which remain governance practice?
Worth borrowing from the forced labour territory
Borrow LeBaron (2021): if your audits don't look at wages and purchasing practices, they audit around the mechanism that recruits forced labour.
Worth borrowing from the leadership and governance territory
Borrow Choudhury (2023): even mandatory HRDD risks window-dressing while corporate purpose points the other way. Your compliance chapter needs a structure paragraph.
Access, medicines & development
This territory will feel familiar if your portfolio case sits close to Novo Nordisk patents or coffee value chains. If that sounds like your case, this is a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 2Day 3Day 10Day 12
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Moyn (2018) — Moyn's figure of Croesus shows that perfect compliance is compatible with absolute inequality: human rights function as floor-setting machinery, and your case sits exactly where the ceiling question begins.
Fassin (2012) — Humanitarian government is compassion given as a one-way gift, which fixes hierarchy in place; that is the frame for every access programme your company publicizes.
Richey & Ponte (2021) with Atal & Richey (2021) — Brand Aid is aid to brands: whoever defines the crisis also defines what counts as help, always through consumption. The authors trace the model back to American Express's 1983 cause-marketing campaign — useful history for any CSR analysis.
Wettstein (2012) — Wettstein's argument for positive obligations grounded in corporate purpose is the strongest philosophical case for your company doing more than compliance; read Choudhury (2023) immediately afterwards as the strongest counter-argument.
Scholz et al. (2024) — In COVAX, contract, strategy, and reputation — not virtue — drove the vaccine firms' engagement, and the firms acted responsibly at country level but not globally; the study complicates both the optimistic account and the cynical account with evidence.
Elgar Handbook — 'Maximum available resources' is still unmeasurable — the 1966 split built social rights with weaker claimability by design. Any access claim you make operates inside that architecture.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. State the strongest version of the business-model defence in your case, then answer it with Wettstein — and answer Wettstein with Choudhury.
  2. Apply Scholz's finding to your case: which lever (contract, strategy, reputation) could actually move your case company, and who holds it?
  3. Is your case a floors problem or a ceilings problem, in Moyn's terms — and what follows for the remedy you propose?
Worth borrowing from the foundations of the course (Days 1–2)
Borrow Rorty (1993): sad stories, not arguments, expand sympathy — then watch Day 7's campaigns manufacture exactly that, and decide where legitimate persuasion ends.
Worth borrowing from the leadership and governance territory
Borrow Strand (2024): industrial-foundation ownership makes long-termism rational. Your company's generosity question may be an ownership question.
Leadership, governance & everyone's spine
This territory will feel familiar whatever your portfolio case, because leadership is the layer no case escapes. Any case makes this a good place to start your revision.
Most of what this territory needs lives in these days:
Day 7Day 8Day 9Day 12
Readings worth returning to first — what each one argues, and how they speak to each other
Maak, Pless & Voegtlin (2016) — A leader's value orientation produces a leadership style, which in turn produces political engagement, with governance moderating the chain; this is the chain beneath every leader your case praises or blames.
Wettstein (2012) against Choudhury (2023) — This pairing is the course's central disagreement. Wettstein argues that companies carry positive human-rights duties grounded in what a company is for; Choudhury shows that corporate law's ownership and purpose rules install the opposite default. Read together, the two explain the same failures twice — once through the leader's choices, once through the structure around the leader.
Strand (2024) — Strand explains the Nordic 'critic as resource' reflex by ownership structure: purpose is reoriented by foundations, not by statutes. Strand is the counter-experiment to Choudhury's structural default.
Scholz et al. (2024) — CEO conviction is real only at the margin, inside structure; cite Scholz et al. whenever an account attributes more influence to a leader's convictions than the evidence supports.
McCorquodale & Neely (2022) — The directors' oversight duty corresponds closely to UNGP 17, but the duty is owed to the company, with victims outside it. The duty is the strongest doctrinal basis for treating due diligence as a director's duty — and it names the limit: the duty protects the company, while the people harmed remain outside that protection.
Reisman (2012) with Ruggie (2017) — Reisman's point is that a rule's force comes from authority combined with actual control, not from its formal source — which is why a boycott can constrain a company more effectively than a statute. Ruggie shows the UNGPs working exactly this way, through three governance systems and a social norm. Together they explain why formally voluntary instruments keep producing binding effects in practice.
Questions you should be able to answer about your portfolio case — the company or situation your own assignments examine
  1. Which archetype did your case's leadership perform — Steward, Humanitarian, Strategist — and what did the performance cost?
  2. Take one leadership claim from your case: which legitimacy base carries it, and does practice match projection?
  3. Sketch the governance architecture that would have caught your case's failure early: ownership, escalation, record — and who was structurally unable to see it.
Worth borrowing, whichever territory your portfolio case sits in
This spine runs through every other orientation: wherever your reading list feels thin, the Day 8–9 pairing (Maak → Choudhury → McCorquodale & Neely) supplies the argument's skeleton.
Worth borrowing from the next frontier (Days 11–12)
Borrow Jones (2023): the empty chair is a governance diagnosis. Whatever your case, ask who is structurally absent from the table that decides.

Part 2 · The course, day by day

What follows is the whole course in order, one day at a time. For each day you will find the central ideas, the legal instruments and cases that were actually used in class, the exercise we did together, and three questions you can use to test yourself. The days were designed to build on one another, so if a concept feels unclear, the day before it usually holds the missing piece.

Day 00 — Course Opening: the course, the programme, and how to use them
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Thirteen days organised in five thematic blocks
· Course calibrates continuously to the group's interests and gaps
· Executive-education design: minimal shared exigencies, real personal autonomy
· Leadership taught as multidisciplinarity, competency-based decision-making, ethical responsibility
· "Strategic" means incorporating multi-level, cross-setting interaction into analysis
· Capacities trained: structure fuzzy information; reverse-engineer problem structure
· Analytic analogy maps structure to structure and declares its limits
· Outcome aim: autonomous sensemaking, problem recognition, problem solving
The instruments and cases we worked with
· No legal instruments taught; framing references only: Rorty (violence as inhumane treatment); International Law fragmentation described as "the Hydra" (rejected as random metaphor)
· Games typology as demonstration analogy: competitive/cooperative, symmetric/asymmetric (chess, rescue operation, regulator vs firm)
What we did together
- The Role Compass: 14 forced choices, 7 roles, ipsative self-snapshot, retakable any day (live web tool)
Three questions to test yourself
  1. How does an analytic analogy differ from a random metaphor?
  2. Name the three components of leadership as the course defines its learning objectives.
  3. What is the meaning of "strategic" in the course title, as opposed to "operational"?
Where this day leads: We now move directly on to the Day 1 content deck — the course itself begins.
Day 01 — Introduction to International Legal Aspects of Human Rights & Humanitarian Protection
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Read rights from their end (telos), not their origin
· Rights end by expulsion: Arendt's "right to have rights"
· Claimability: a right needs addressee, forum, remedy
· Rights collapse with war, the guarantor state, or life itself
· A right = legal norm plus a holder's enforceable claim
· Governance gap: multinationals escaped the state-addressed rights grammar
· The justification chosen prices the demand placed on the firm
· UNGPs won unanimity by bracketing foundations and inequality
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Instruments: the 1919 Constitution of the ILO; the 1945 United Nations Charter; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the 1949 Geneva Conventions; the two Covenants of 1966; ICCPR Art. 4 (derogation and the non-derogable core); the reservations made by Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to CEDAW; the 2003 draft UN Norms; the 1999 Global Compact; the 2011 UNGPs (the Protect–Respect–Remedy framework and the HRDD cycle: assess, integrate, track, communicate); the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015; the French duty of vigilance law of 2017; the EU CSDDD; UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 (2022)
· Authors/frameworks: Donnelly (dignity, relative universality); Rorty (sentimental stories, Bosnia 1992); Moyn (Croesus; sufficiency vs equality); Sikkink ("compared to what?"); Van Engeland (universality debate, Rahman apostasy case); Ruggie (embedded liberalism; principled pragmatism); Arendt; Hobbes; Weber; Lemkin; Jonas; Hart's norms table; Reisman (incorporation as a national prerogative)
· Cases/episodes: Nike sweatshops; Shell Ogoniland 1995 (Ken Saro-Wiwa); cold-open artefacts (UNHCR Amina story, H&M Modern Slavery Statement, Oxfam "What She Makes")
What we did together
- Justification Tribunal (NordThread/Kesh vignette, five chambers); structured controversy with forced side-switch on the HRDD floor/ceiling motion; timeline lab 1919→2024
Three questions to test yourself
  1. List the three components of claimability and give one real situation in which each component fails.
  2. Why did the UNGPs attain unanimous endorsement when the UN Norms failed to do so?
  3. Outline Moyn's Croesus thought experiment and explain what it reveals about human rights.
Where this day leads: Day 2 traces how one international norm hardens into national law — choose your yardstick first.
Day 02 — Formation of International Norms & National Legal Frameworks
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Every verdict on rights depends on the chosen comparison (Sikkink)
· Tripartism diffuses norms via information, ownership, translation
· Progressive realisation and "available resources" build friction by design
· Respect is cost-free; protect and fulfil are cost-demanding
· The environmental right ran two routes: greening existing cases, constitutional entrenchment
· The limitation of proceduralism: even with full compliance, the desired outcome is still missed (2.6°C)
· Institutional design trades legitimacy without sanctions against sanctions without legitimacy
· Norm hardening is observable in real time (OSH 2019→2022)
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Instruments: ICESCR Art. 2(1); Vienna 1993; the Aarhus Convention of 1998 (which covers information, participation and access to justice); the Escazú Agreement of 2018; the Paris Agreement of 2015 (NDCs, the ratchet mechanism and Art. 2.1(c)); UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 (2022); the ILO Declaration on Social Justice of 2008; the ILO centenary report of 2019 (the Universal Labour Guarantee); the recognition of occupational safety and health (OSH) as the fifth Fundamental Principle in 2022; the UN treaty bodies and their General Comments; the WTO/Marrakesh agreement of 1995; the Singapore Ministerial Conference of 1996 (the labour-standards boundary); and the "social clause" debate
· Authors: Sikkink (chapter 2 of Evidence for Hope); Maul (the ILO century); Nowak and Bílková (Elgar); Boyle (greening and the trilemma); Boyd (92 plus 12 constitutional rights); Addo 1999 (the "before" photograph); Tyc (trade and labour)
· Cases: KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland (Grand Chamber of the ECtHR, 9 April 2024, Articles 8 and 6(1)); the companion cases Carême and Duarte Agostinho were dismissed
What we did together
- Timeline lab, void → norm → national law (18-card deck, 1919→2024) with hardening predictions for 2035; Boyle's trilemma mapping; ILO vs WTO institutional relay debate; collective timeline tool (aarhus2026timeline.pages.dev)
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Why do economic and social rights diffuse later and less evenly than civil-political rights?
  2. Explain the two routes to establishing an environmental right and what the year 2022 revealed about each route.
  3. What did KlimaSeniorinnen hold, and why is the judgment referred to as "greening" rather than a new right?
Where this day leads: Day 3 asks who enforces international norms inside corporate governance — ESG and reporting frameworks.
Day 03 — Development of Corporate Responsibility Frameworks
The ideas at the centre of the day
· ESG ratings diverge (correlation of about 0.30) because there is no settled object of measurement
· Divergence lives in measurement (53%) and scope (44%), not weights
· CSR, sustainability, ESG follow distinct logics; terminology is unstable
· ESG reversed the gaze: what issues do to investment risk
· Two theories of change: financial model vs entity model
· The financial model won by infrastructure, not adequacy
· Outcomes change when systems change, not when initiatives accumulate
· Measure outcomes, not programs (the surgeon test)
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Frameworks/readings: MacNeil and Esser (the financial model versus the entity model; the stewardship paradox); Liang and Renneboog (rating divergence; around 90% of studies on the ESG–performance link are non-negative); Eccles and Serafeim (the performance frontier; the four moves; the four barriers); Dobbin and Kalev (Getting to Diversity: the 3.5%→3.1% finding; the what-works evidence table); Nielsen and Villadsen (the Danish ESG discourse 2010–2021, 24 large-cap companies); Tyc chapter 6 (private labour instruments supplement law, not substitute it); the UNGC/GRI Analysis and the SDG target-level mapping; stewardship codes; the GRI social standards
· Cases/examples: constructed two-verdict ESG rating illustration; Maersk ("licence to operate"), Novozymes, Pandora articulations; Amina in two frames (rights-holder vs financial)
What we did together
- NordTex A/S workshop: four instruments, eight decisions (materiality, evidence, governance, reporting); plus the What Works Audit (ten initiatives, mechanism + metric required)
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Why do ESG ratings disagree with each other, and why is "weights" the smallest cause of the disagreement?
  2. Compare the financial and entity models with regard to focus, channel, and metrics.
  3. What did Dobbin and Kalev find about mandatory diversity training, and what works instead?
Where this day leads: Day 4 puts the NordTex issues under human-rights due diligence and corporate liability law.
Day 04 — From Responsibility to Legal Accountability
The ideas at the centre of the day
· A three-stage progression: first comes responsibility (the conduct that is expected before, during, and after harm), then accountability (determining who must explain themselves or accept consequences and before which institution), and finally legal liability (a legal rule that is applied to the defendant; the forum may order a remedy or impose a sanction).
· Three gates to remedy: WHO is the defendant, WHERE is the forum, and WHAT is the legal basis. The possible outcomes are that the claim is blocked, the claim proceeds, the claim settles, a judgment is given, or a remedy is awarded.
· There are three possible scenarios for forum determination: too few forums (no viable forum, which results in effective impunity, and the grievance migrates to the media, politics and protest); one competent forum (in which case the rights in question become claimable); or too many forums (leading to forum shopping, with the defendants challenging the venue on the grounds of forum non conveniens and resulting in parallel proceedings). "The fight over where is often the first fight over whether" — forum determination is not a procedure that comes before the case, it IS the case.
· There is no general international court that hears the human rights liabilities of corporations: the ICC accepts only natural persons (such as Lubanga), the ICJ handles cases between states, the regional human rights courts have states as the respondents, and in investor-state arbitration corporations are the claimants, not the defendants.
· Separate legal personality and limited liability: a corporate group can operate as a single business yet remain several separate legal persons; the parent company is not liable merely because it owns a subsidiary.
· Procedure determines whether a right is claimable: evidence, funding, collective action, enforcement, and safety.
· The same harm could activate the host state, the home state, or a third state (but only if there is a sufficient legal connection); universal jurisdiction is a narrow special criminal route (for grave international crimes, usually involving individuals), not a general civil claim.
· Reading discipline: follow the holding, the procedural posture, and the vote — not the headline (the headline "corporate liability rejected" is usually narrower than it sounds).
· As the ATS route narrowed, the litigation migrated to the ordinary tort law of the parent's home state; the theory shifted from "the group is one company" to "the parent's own conduct may have created a duty".
· Public policies, governance arrangements and reports shape prevention — and those same policies, arrangements and reports may become evidence when a dispute arises.
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Five plain-English terms: defendant, forum, jurisdiction, cause of action, remedy (this version uses "cause of action" rather than "legal route"). Board translation: "legal risk" is too vague — ask which defendant, which forum, which jurisdictional basis, which cause of action, and which remedy.
· The instrument map includes litigation (the ATS and parent-company tort — Day 4), reporting (under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 — Days 3 to 4), due diligence (covering EU and national HRDD — Day 9), grievance mechanisms (involving the OECD National Contact Points — Day 10), and criminal law (including that of the ICC and domestic law — Day 5).
· The Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. §1350, is a jurisdictional door rather than a corporate-liability code: a claim requires an alien plaintiff, a civil tort claim, and a sufficiently specific norm of international law; territory, the type of defendant, and the relevant conduct within the United States still matter.
· In the case of Doe v Unocal, concerning the Myanmar Yadana pipeline and the use of forced labour by the military security forces, the 1997 district court ruled that the Alien Tort Statute could be applied to a private corporation; the Ninth Circuit panel's standard involving knowledge and substantial assistance was vacated for en banc review; the case was settled in 2005 before any final merits judgment.
· The narrowing trilogy mapped to the three gates: Kiobel 2013 narrowed WHERE (foreign conduct must "touch and concern" US territory); Jesner 2018 narrowed WHO (foreign corporations were excluded, while US corporations were not categorically excluded); Nestlé 2021 narrowed WHAT US conduct suffices (general corporate decision-making in the United States is not sufficient). None of these cases held that corporations are exempt from international law.
· ATS business lessons: domicile alone does not create exposure; group structure splits conduct from target; domestic conduct must be pleaded; a failed ATS theory does not eliminate other statutes, torts, criminal investigations or non-judicial mechanisms.
· In Vedanta Resources v Lungowe [2019] there were 1,826 claimants from Zambia; the KCM company operated the mine; the UK parent company was sued in England; the case reached only the jurisdiction stage (an arguable case, not a finding of final liability). There is nothing "special or conclusive" about the bare parent–subsidiary relationship; an arguable duty can still arise from the design of the group's policy, from active implementation of that policy (such as through training, supervision, monitoring and enforcement), or from the public representation of oversight. The "Embedding Sustainability" report became Exhibit A. England retained the case: although Zambia was overwhelmingly the proper place, there was a real risk that substantial justice would be denied (since there was no legal aid, conditional-fee funding was not available, and there was insufficient specialist capacity). "Allowed to proceed" is not "held liable."
· Two legal grammars for the same problem: the US ATS (an international-law norm together with jurisdiction and a narrow cause of action; the questions are the defendant's eligibility and the US conduct) and UK negligence (which focuses on the parent's own conduct — on what the parent controlled, implemented or represented — and on which forum would give substantial justice). Neither grammar creates automatic group liability.
· Executive coherence test — "can we support what we say?": this test covers decision rights, evidence of implementation, entity boundaries, and public claims. The test is not a reason to avoid oversight; it is a reason to govern and to document that governance coherently.
· Reading paths: Chapters 2 to 3 of Joseph, plus Dodge and the Nestlé update (the US route); either Bradshaw or Ojeda (the UK parent duty); Chapters 5, 6, 9, and 11 of Deva and Bilchitz (the normative foundations); and Ford, Gillan and Thein (the OECD NCPs and non-judicial mechanisms).
What we did together
This version does not include a dedicated in-class lab (the deck is framed as "a quick guide"): the working tools are the three-gate map, the forum-determination scenarios, the decided/not-decided case grid (Kiobel, Jesner, Nestlé, Vedanta), and the executive-lens board questions.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. List the three gates and state which gate was narrowed by each of Kiobel, Jesner and Nestlé.
  2. What are the three forum-determination scenarios and what is the practical result of each?
  3. In Vedanta, which three kinds of parent conduct can make a duty of care arguable, why is ownership by itself not enough, and why did England retain the Zambian case?
Where this day leads: The hand-off: Day 5 covers conflict and criminal boundaries, Day 6 operational due diligence, Day 9 mandatory HRDD and governance, and Day 10 grievance and stakeholder voice.
Day 05 — Humanitarian Protection and Corporate Responsibility (Leading Responsibly in Conflict-Affected Areas)
The ideas at the centre of the day
· The existence of an armed conflict is a legal threshold, not a mood or a temporary state of mind.
· When there is a conflict, ordinary business assets become conflict assets.
· The recurring question is this: what does the operation move, enable, finance, and legitimize?
· Companies need both lenses, namely IHRL and IHL.
· hHRDD analyses impacts on people AND impacts on the conflict itself.
· The UNDP states that business in conflict areas "will never be neutral".
· The decision thresholds are: to continue, to condition, to suspend, or to exit — or to repair.
· A licence answers one question; end-use diligence answers another.
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Legal vocabulary: IAC / NIAC / occupation; civilian, combatant, member of an armed group, direct participation in hostilities; civilian object, dual-use asset, military objective (ICRC Customary IHL Rules 7–8); refugee (under the 1951 Convention), IDP, asylum seeker.
· Frameworks: the UNDP heightened HRDD Guide (2022); the UNGPs' three categories of involvement (cause, contribute, or directly linked); the business-conflict interaction map (moving from context to business function to conflict effect to risk to decision); the six-question hHRDD routine (trigger, analyse, map, triage, act and track); Article 7(3) of the Arms Trade Treaty; the Geneva Conventions.
· Context data: one in six people is exposed to conflict (ACLED 2025); 123.2 million people have been forcibly displaced (UNHCR 2024); the DRC provides about 75% of the world's cobalt output; resource rents amount to around 13% of GDP in fragile economies.
· Case capsules: Zyklon B / Tesch & Stabenow (1946–48) — dual-use products and knowledge; van Anraat (NL 2005–09) — convicted as an accessory to war crimes for supplying chemical precursors, but acquitted of genocide for lack of intent; Anvil Mining / Kilwa (DRC 2007) — logistics facilitation, ending in acquittals and illustrating the proof hurdle; Kouwenhoven (NL 2017–18) — Liberian timber, sentenced to 19 years for arms trafficking and complicity in war crimes; Lafarge Syria (US 2022) — a $777.78 million guilty plea for providing material support to ISIS and al-Nusrah; Lundin / Sudan (Sweden) — the market repriced the company before any verdict (a decrease of 7.9% during the week the indictment was issued); Musema (ICTR 2000/01) — superior responsibility applied to the director of a tea factory; Facebook / Rohingya — a gap in platform accountability, still unresolved.
· Constructive roles: protection and recovery infrastructure; the Better Shelter (a project by the IKEA Foundation and UNHCR) — a good product that still needs system governance.
What we did together
Country X dossier. The board must decide whether to continue, set conditions, suspend, or exit within 48 hours. Prepare a 200-word executive memo with seven components. These components are recommendation, conflict trigger, business function, conflict effect, legal or ethical concern, immediate controls, and evidence request. Also, prepare a 3-minute presentation.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Distinguish IAC, NIAC and occupation, and explain why the threshold changes the due-diligence burdens.
  2. Contrast van Anraat and Anvil Mining: what role did knowledge and evidence play in each outcome?
  3. What are the six steps that make up the hHRDD routine and which two directions of impact must the routine assess?
Where this day leads: Tomorrow asks how companies build the operating system — a due-diligence process that can see, act, and prove.
Day 06 — Human Rights Risk Management in Global Business Operations (Due Diligence as Operating System)
The ideas at the centre of the day
· HRDD is a continuous management process, not an audit event.
· HRDD is usually an obligation of conduct, not an obligation of result.
· The operating test: see, classify, act, and prove.
· Uncertainty should trigger diligence, not excuse the failure to act.
· There are two response tracks. One is to suspend or disengage. The other is to engage and mitigate.
· Exit is also an impact, measured in terms of severity, leverage, dependence, and timing.
· Leakage: the risk moves around the rule instead of disappearing.
· A process for which there is no evidence cannot be defended.
The instruments and cases we worked with
· UNGPs Principles 17 to 21 (the HRDD components; cause, contribute, or directly linked).
· The OECD's Due Diligence Guidance for Conflict Minerals (2016) presents a five-step engine: establish management systems, identify and assess the risks, respond, audit the chokepoints, and report; it includes an Annex II model policy; it lists red flags; CAHRA extends beyond war to cover instability, repression and institutional weakness; the rule is that if the origin cannot be determined, due diligence should proceed anyway.
· The OECD Guidelines (2023) address responsible disengagement.
· The SEC's 3TG disclosure rule under Dodd-Frank §1502 (a disclosure rule, not a ban on sourcing): the gains (improved traceability and reduced control by armed groups) contrast with the limits (falsified origin, trade diversion, and the de facto embargo affecting artisanal miners).
· The EU Conflict Minerals Regulation 2017/821 specifies binding obligations on importers (relating to the 3TG minerals and the thresholds).
· UNSC Res. 1952 (2010) seeded the due-diligence recommendations.
· The CSDDD was adopted in 2024 and was amended/postponed by Omnibus I; teach the direction of travel, not stale timetables.
· Readings: Smit et al. 2020 (the current standard of care / reasonableness); LeBaron 2021 (the labour blind spot: wages and purchasing terms); Martínez San Millán 2021 (critique of effectiveness); Bartels & Schramade 2024 (the human-rights data problem blocks the investor lever).
What we did together
Workshop: from facts to the risk register (specifying the risk, the source, the status, the involvement, the action, and the evidence gap) → application of the decision criteria (to continue, to condition, to suspend, or to disengage) → preparation of a decision note; the debrief then tests operational effectiveness and legal defensibility.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. List the five steps established by the OECD and explain why due diligence is a capability rather than an inspection.
  2. Which risks demand suspension or disengagement under OECD Annex II, and which instead call for engagement and mitigation?
  3. What did Dodd-Frank §1502 document as gains, and what is "leakage"?
Where this day leads: Tomorrow the system meets a live operation: lead a humanitarian organisation under uncertainty and defend the record after landfall.
Day 07 — Humanitarian Business Practices and Brand Aid (Simulation, Contracts and Communication)
The ideas at the centre of the day
· The recurring question: is the company delivering help, buying legitimacy, or both?
· Exit, voice, and loyalty serve as the language for the Day 5 decisions.
· Archetypes are objective functions, not personalities.
· Every institutional objective makes some harm easier to ignore.
· A contract is a form of behavioural design, not merely a price.
· There are two ledgers: a money ledger and a people ledger.
· After every operation, a different story begins.
· Compassion can connect people and at the same time be unequal (Fassin): the gift admits no reciprocity; it is a politics of solidarity which is also a politics of inequality. "We lamented their dead but celebrated our generosity."
· Branded content: advertising that does not look like advertising. When the ad does not look like an ad, defences do not deploy.
· Brandaidification: Corporate social responsibility drifts from conscious consumption (i.e. considering how goods are made — Day 6) to compassionate consumption (i.e. linking the purchase to some distant cause). A brand with a wage problem would rather discuss refugees.
· Causumerism / low-cost heroism: caring expressed through buying, with the cause detached from how the product was made.
· The witness positions are the testis (a neutral third-party observer) and the superstes (the survivor); the branded film manufactures a synthetic third position (the viewer adopts the survivor's point of view). Fassin states that aid attends to biological life while muting biographical life.
· Henriksen speaks of corporate humanitarian solutionism: the same sector performs both care and control, such as running refugee apps from one building and providing border-surveillance contracts from another.
· The closing thesis of the lecturer's article (offered as a thesis to be attacked) is that the refugee is rendered "both entrepreneur and enterprise", while the state — the cause of displacement and the potential grantor of asylum — is erased from every story.
The instruments and cases we worked with
· The HumanitSim simulation (at aarhus2026gamehumanitarian.pages.dev) includes mandates, vendor contracts, uncertainty, and the record after landfall.
· There are three archetypes: the Steward protects the funds, with the blind spot of delay and unmet need; the Humanitarian minimizes social cost (logistics cost plus deprivation cost), with the blind spot of exhausting resources; and the Strategist funds coverage when the marginal benefit justifies the cost, with the blind spot that thresholds make suffering negotiable.
· The Fan et al. 2024 engine combines three objectives with three inventory arrangements (organisation stores / vendor stores / shared), resulting in nine contracts; the deprivation cost is the human cost of relief not arriving in time (that is, Fassin's "inequality of lives" expressed in another dialect).
· The heuristic of exit / voice / loyalty was proposed by Hirschman in 1970.
· Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: crises are governed through moral emotions; there is an asymmetry between giver and receiver; compassion fatigue exists; the concepts of testis and superstes; the distinction between biological and biographical life.
· The article that the lecturer co-authored with Martinelli and Zanforlin in Comunicação, Mídia e Consumo analysed the three campaigns; the lecturer's conflict of interest is declared as a teaching device — students are graded on the quality of the attack, never on agreement.
· In Brand Aid, by Richey and Ponte, there is a double flow: brands provide aid, and that aid in turn returns legitimacy to the brands. Any honest analysis holds both meanings; any dishonest analysis drops one half.
· Genealogy: American Express trademarked cause-related marketing in 1983 with its Statue of Liberty campaign, which had advertising costs of about $4 million compared to the $1.7 million that was raised, with card usage increasing by 27 percent; the marketing budget was more than double the amount raised for the charity.
· The Product RED arithmetic: for the Gap "(2 WEEKS)" t-shirt, about 27 t-shirts fund one patient's antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for a year; nevertheless, more than $600 million moved to the Global Fund — which is the strongest version of the argument in Brand Aid's favour.
· Campaign autopsies: Ode to Lesvos (in 2015 the village of Skala Sikamineas, with 153 inhabitants, helped about 300,000 refugees; the actual documentary director was Talal Derki, himself a Syrian exile; in the final seconds the message Keep Walking appears along with the Mercy Corps logo; not a single refugee speaks — the 2016 Brazilian variant proved that the genre can give refugees a voice); Budweiser's "Born the Hard Way" (shown at the Super Bowl in 2017, with about $10 million in airtime, a few days after the travel ban; it received 21.7 million views and triggered the #BoycottBudweiser campaign — an example of both courage and newsjacking) compared to the 2026 "American Icons" campaign (which uses the same emotional machinery but opts for safer nostalgic nationalism); the Better Shelter double ledger (the real shelter has an area of 17.5 m² and is deployed with the UNHCR, its lockable door has been praised by resident Hamid Abdelraza, it won the Beazley Design of the Year award and was included in MoMA — set against a cost of about €35 million for 30,000 units, IKEA's position as the largest private donor to the UNHCR, Ben Parker's critique of Dadaab, IKEA's tax avoidance, and Agier's argument that camps are in effect permanent, the transitoriness being a media construction).
· The COVID typology presented by Atal and Richey in 2021 identifies three types of crisis: a crisis of expertise or logistics, a crisis of resources or capital, and a crisis of the self — whichever group defines the crisis determines what counts as help.
· The COVID sequence: Uber (restraint), Dove (sacrifice as beauty), Airbnb (the platform as infrastructure); among the Danish and European anchors are Novo Nordisk, Maersk Bridge, Armedangels (a donation to MSF), and Zoku (the crisis of the self).
· Henriksen points out that inside Google.org, Signpost, and Techfugees, Big Tech's humanitarianism is asymmetrical and profit-oriented (where profit means not just money but also reputation, data, talent, and markets); it is governed through hackathons; yet its funding did reach the "too political" gap along the US–Mexico border.
· Ben Affleck's Senate testimony treated the person as a brand; the statement "It's good business" is the leadership tightrope (read generously, it means a responsible commitment to stay; read critically, it means the cause is metabolised into competitive advantage).
· Five-question campaign grid: SHOWS, NAMES, ASKS, OMITS, RETURNS. Ethical communication checklist: voice, resources, politics, delivery, gain.
What we did together
Day 5 report-back (exit/voice/loyalty), the HumanitSim simulation with debrief (judgment, contract or luck?), and the communication/Brand Aid labs: silent screening cold-open (three films, three written words each, board re-read at close); Ad-Deconstruction Studio (shot-by-shot worksheet: what is shown → which reading names the move → whose voice, who is silent; verdict: mostly aid-to-brands or brands-that-provide-aid); Defender's Brief (beat or concede five steelman arguments — real money, real goods, unaffordable attention, legitimised welcome, unfashionable money); Pitch the Ethical Campaign (five reading-traceable constraints: beneficiaries hold authorial voice, money flows disclosed, a political cause of displacement named, one delivery commitment with a deprivation-cost-style pledge, the Henriksen test — state what the firm gains).
Four questions to test yourself
  1. List the three simulation archetypes, state what each one optimises and also indicate each one's blind spot.
  2. What are the three objectives and the three inventory arrangements put forward by Fan et al., and why is a contract described as "behavioural design"?
  3. Apply the five-question grid to a campaign concerning COVID: what crisis is defined and what does the brand gain?
  4. Run the double ledger on Better Shelter: what goes on the credit side and what on the debit side — and why is "it's only cynical / only generous" a shortcut?
Where this day leads: Day 8 asks what kind of leadership culture produces these decisions before the camera arrives. For the pre-task, bring one current (2024–26) humanitarian campaign and run the grid on it cold — does Brand Aid still describe the genre, or has the genre mutated?
Day 08 — Building Ethical Leadership to Promote Human Rights (From Personal Influence to Institutional Responsibility)
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Order matters: ethics → authority → evidence → institution.
· Moral person vs moral manager: make ethics governable.
· Four-layer grid: claim, practice, institution, consequence.
· Weber's authority types: traditional, charismatic, legal-rational.
· Ladder: notoriety → influence → authority → leadership → governance.
· Good intentions can lose against corporate architecture.
· Rate the claim, not whether you like the person.
· Even admired leaders need rules, records, counter-powers, consequences.
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Weber, Economy and Society — three ideal types of legitimate domination; real organisations mix all three; charisma risk: a challenge to the leader feels disloyal.
· Theriono & Lianto 2024 — ethical-leadership vocabulary (moral person / moral manager, after Brown, Treviño & Harrison).
· Choudhury 2023 — corporate law's threat to human rights: risk partition (separate personality, limited liability) and incentive pressure can defeat human-rights due diligence (HRDD).
· Maak, Pless & Voegtlin 2016 — shareholder advocate (instrumental) vs business statesman (integrative); the statesman style is more necessary where institutions are weak.
· Wettstein 2012 — positive human-rights responsibilities beyond "do no harm".
· Strand 2024 — Nordic leadership, CEO visibility and institutions.
· Analytical anchor: person ↔ institution × projection ↔ evidence (persona, behavioural marks, institutional story, institutional capacity).
· Four archetype cases (revealed after rating): A Jensen Huang / NVIDIA — founder charisma+expertise+performance; independent board but exceptional identification; B Jacinda Ardern — empathy in elected office ("They are us"); Christchurch response via legislation, buy-back, Royal Commission; trade-offs of urgent lawmaking; C Roshni Nadar Malhotra / HCLTech — legacy chair as steward; chair/CEO split; non-independent legacy chair; responsible AI also a commercial offering; D Alex Karp / Palantir — mission-driven defence founder ("Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people"); human-rights policy alongside founder voting power up to 49.999999%; 2026 AGM human-rights proposals failed.
· HumanitSim connection: archetypes were mandates, not personalities; Moyn (Day 1): rights should not become a ceiling.
What we did together
Anonymous live classroom pulse (aarhus2026ethicalleader.pages.dev): Pulse A (ethical-leadership expectations) and Pulse B (influence vs constraint), then per-case legitimacy base + credibility rating (1–5), re-rated after the name reveal with one-sentence justification.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Define Weber's three types of legitimate authority and give each a corporate echo.
  2. For one case, run the four layers: claim, practice, institution, consequence — what counter-power exists?
  3. Contrast the shareholder advocate and business statesman, and explain when the integrative style becomes necessary.
Where this day leads: Day 9: when individual leadership becomes governance — a concern must become information, authority, decision and record.
Day 09 — Building Corporate Governance for Human Rights
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Governance route: concern → information → authority → decision → record → follow-up
· A visible concern stays ungoverned without authority, obligation, accountability
· International law is state-centred; firms hold private political authority (Kobrin)
· Voluntary codes harden via practice, contracts, misrepresentation, due-diligence evidence
· Directors' duties: shareholder primacy, pluralist models, enlightened shareholder value
· Directors' duty is usually owed to the company; affected people rarely sue directors
· Caremark oversight and UNGP 17 share one architecture: know–build–monitor–respond
· Economic complicity: host state as regulator, partner, licensor — and perpetrator
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Talisman Energy in Sudan: campaign, ATS suit, exit, possible relocation of harm (Kobrin 2009)
· McBarnet 2007: CSR beyond law, through law, for law
· Muchlinski 2007: soft commitments become the standard the board must meet
· McCorquodale & Neely 2022: directors' duties as HRDD infrastructure; Caremark/UNGP 17 mapping
· Siemens/Neubürger: liability for missing group-wide compliance system
· Antuzis: exploitation harmed company, contributed to personal director liability
· French Duty of Vigilance; EU CSDDD (in force 2024, Omnibus I; transposition 26-07-2028, application 26-07-2029)
· Olsen & Bernal-Bermúdez 2023 CHRD: 1,227 claims, >30% state abuse in corporate context
· Board screening variables: political past, mineral-rent dependence, union repression
What we did together
Moment 4 stress test: build a Vestland Resources governance architecture, then decide stay, pause, re-consult or exit.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Map the four Caremark-style board acts onto UNGP 17 due-diligence steps.
  2. Why may a board be liable for a missing system rather than the harmful act? Use Siemens/Neubürger.
  3. Talisman exited Sudan under pressure: why might that count as relocating, not solving, the risk?
Where this day leads: Day 9 built internal reporting to the board; Day 10 asks who outside can see, question and influence that account.
Day 10 — Stakeholder Engagement & Strategic Communications
The ideas at the centre of the day
· Day test: who is heard, who can challenge, what changes?
· Stakeholder: anyone whose interests the organisation's activity affects or could affect
· Categories: people who cannot opt out, workers/unions, public actors, proxies/experts
· Three involvement levels: consultation, participation, steering — match level to risk
· Engagement triggers: after harm, before approval, during crisis, preventively
· Dialogue cycle: open, sustain, close, process, report back
· Engagement must change scope, disclosure, verification or remedy — otherwise it is only information-gathering
· Smart mix: national/international × voluntary/mandatory levers combined
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Google AI Principles cold open: consulted/participating/steering; affected non-users absent
· GRI standards: GRI 1, 2, 3; disclosure 2-29 (who/why/how engaged)
· Neighbouring disclosures: 3-1, 3-3, 2-12, 2-16; also 2-25, 2-26
· Bamiatzi et al. 2024: Fortune Global 500 COVID patterns — donors, minimalists, educators, collaborators
· DIHR smart-mix framework (Holly & Lysgaard 2021); UNGPs
· "Voluntary with a deadline": Norway transparency/right to ask, Finland programme, Denmark/Sweden via EU
· Promise-reading test: named people, checkable claims, independent eyes, a consequence
What we did together
Nordhavn Roundtable (aarhus2026roundtable.pages.dev): six roles negotiate a Safe City facial-recognition pilot — four clauses (scope, disclosure, verification, remedy), each naming actor, verifier, consequence.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Distinguish consultation, participation and steering; give a situation justifying each level.
  2. What does GRI 2-29 require an organisation to disclose, and what can GRI not do?
  3. In Nordhavn, why must every clause name an actor, verifier and consequence?
Where this day leads: Complex technology makes affected people invisible and evidence technical — Day 11 asks what law should require before AI is deployed where risk is serious.
Day 11 — AI in Humanitarian Action and Armed Conflict
The ideas at the centre of the day
· AI is both business output and business capacity with humanitarian consequences
· Two domains, one question: what may the machine shape, who stays accountable?
· Analytical chain: use case → data → model → decision → human role → consequence → record
· Do no harm is a decision rule: anticipate, reduce, pause or refuse
· Three deployment gates: data quality, bias/exclusion, consent under power asymmetry
· Adoption is organisational capability: understand, test, supervise, stop the system
· Human oversight must be real: understand, question, intervene, deactivate, record
· Dual-use platforms carry two compliance grammars (civilian vs military)
The instruments and cases we worked with
· ICRC 2019 two-domain distinction; ICRC AWS position paper (prohibit unpredictable/anti-personnel AWS; restrict the rest)
· IHL judgement tests: distinction, proportionality, precautions, hors de combat (Yordanova 2025)
· EU AI Act (Reg. 2024/1689): high-risk duties; Article 2(3) military exclusion; Article 14 oversight/automation bias
· NIST AI RMF 1.0: Govern, Map, Measure, Manage
· Beduschi 2022 (humanitarian AI risks); Pantiris et al. 2025 (adoption capability); Hirblinger 2026 Digital Peacebuilding
· Evidence systems: satellite ML damage mapping (PNAS), VIEWS, ConflictForecast, ACLED CAST
· Press file: WCK convoy strike, Kherson drones (Guardian, HRW), surrendering soldiers video, Nasser Hospital camera
· UNIDIR 2024/2025: military-AI governance is fragmented; the recommendation is to make the parallel governance processes complementary
What we did together
Move 4 deployment table: groups design an AI deployment agreement that survives crisis.
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Contrast the main failure modes of humanitarian AI versus military AI.
  2. What does the ICRC propose prohibiting versus restricting in autonomous weapon systems?
  3. Why does the EU AI Act's military exclusion not settle a dual-use vendor's obligations?
Where this day leads: Day 11 ends at capability; Day 12 asks how institutions redesign responsibility when innovation changes the structure of action.
Day 12 — Transformative Innovation, Rights and Collective Action (Closure)
The ideas at the centre of the day
· The canon holds: UNGPs, HRDD, IHL, disclosure, governance, remedy still apply
· Falling cost turns tools into infrastructure: scale, dependency, direction, governance
· Norms travel, machinery lags, people are missing (implementation gap)
· Gap vocabulary: normative, institutional, enforcement, expertise, coordination
· Three currents together: democratise capability, concentrate bottlenecks, degrade trust
· Fluency becomes authority: confidence mistaken for reliability, judgment delegated early
· Complementary rationalities: rights, risk, market, science, democratic, generational
· Polycentric governance: no single actor sees enough; coordination is built
The instruments and cases we worked with
· Two triads: UNGPs 2011 Protect-Respect-Remedy vs Jones 2023 Principles-Processes-Remedies
· Jones 2023: rights as AI baseline; "empty chair" of rights expertise
· OHCHR 2024 Mapping Report A/HRC/56/45: gap is implementation, not rulebook
· Roberts et al. 2024 risk taxonomy; WHO 2024 large multimodal models, value-chain allocation
· Cost-curve evidence: Our World in Data / Farmer & Lafond 2016
· Schot & Steinmueller 2018 three frames; Mazzucato 2018 missions; Ostrom 2010 polycentricity
· Foreign Affairs 2026 "AI Trilemma": national vs economic vs societal security
· Operating-model stack: UNGP/HRDD + EU AI Act + NIST AI RMF + WHO logic
· Hogan & Lasek-Markey 2024: ethics washing and statutory relocation
· UN Declaration on Future Generations 2024: reversibility, dependency, residual risk, capacity
What we did together
No new in-class activity: bring to Day 13 one horizon signal, your project, and one trusted course tool (six-question project compass).
Three questions to test yourself
  1. Name the five governance gaps and give an AI example of each.
  2. How can one AI system democratise capability, concentrate bottlenecks and degrade trust simultaneously?
  3. Why can binding law still under-deliver rights? Use ethics washing and statutory relocation.
Where this day leads: Day 13 is integration, not new content: students pitch projects using the course toolkit and their horizon signal.
Day 13 — Capstone
Bring what Day 12 asked: one horizon signal, your project, one trusted course tool. The six-question project compass closes the loop.

Part 3 · The ideas that kept returning

Certain ideas surfaced on a particular day and then reappeared throughout the rest of the course; the following index gives the days on which each of these ideas occurs so that, whenever you come across one of them during your revision, you will be able to locate its day of origin.

UNGP pillars & the cause/contribute/directly-linked triageDays 1 · 5 · 6
Three-gate forum routing (defendant · forum · route)Day 4
Obligation of conduct vs outcome; 'reasonable' filled by practice (Smit et al.)Days 5 · 6 · 9
Structure / process / outcome; detection vs incidence; the 0.3 problemDay 3
Norm formation: void → norm → national law; Boyle's trilemma; social clauseDays 1 · 2
The smart mix; hardening on schedule (Holly & Lysgaard)Days 2 · 9 · 10
Consultation / participation / steering; GRI 2-29; represented ≠ presentDay 10
Verification: the four questions; clause test (actor · verifier · consequence)Days 10 · 11
Legitimacy bases; Maak's chain; Wettstein vs ChoudhuryDay 8
Archetypes Steward · Humanitarian · Strategist; exit, voice, loyalty; Brand AidDays 5 · 7
Do-no-harm gates; meaningful human control; EU AI Act; NIST RMF; the carve-out trilogyDay 11
Canon-holds thesis; the five gaps; washing across generationsDay 12
Course tools: Role Compass · timeline · HumanitSim · pulse · Nordhavn roundtableDays 0 · 2 · 7 · 8 · 10

Companion to the portfolio (Assignments 1–3 merged). It replaces nothing: the decks, your notes and the readings remain the substance. Reading relations follow the course's own literature reviews (Blocks I–V).