What is it about?
In many areas of the planet, corporations accumulate profits by performing violent practices against local populations. And this violence remains unchecked in spite of legal mechanisms that should restrict it. We conducted a study of corporate violence in a village in India which observed both a multinational's violent practices and the ways in which people attempt to resist it. We found that the corporation kept violence unchecked by derealizing villagers, that is, by making their suffering un-reportable in official accounts and by reinterpreting their grievances through a paternalistic discourse.
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Why is it important?
This paper is important because corporate violence is present is many areas of the world. It is also important because it signals the limitations of existing solutions based either on corporate social responsibility or on legal reform. Our findings indicate that the inclusion of the derealized is neither automatic nor immediate. It requires consistent efforts and structural changes both to identify the derealized and to identify with them.
Perspectives
When Rohit showed me his field-work transcripts in 2009, I immediately recognised unbearable, yet familiar, situations that I had myself witnessed in another Third-World country. Our first thought was to write a narrative centred on primitive accumulation (Marx). But soon after, we found out that the study was revealing something even more unsettling: there existed many institutions which, on paper, were meant to guarantee the safety of the victims of corporate violence. And yet these institutions failed. So we endeavoured to understand the reasons for this failure and our paper started to emerge. First as a Foucauldian account of a panopticon perverted by a powerful corporation and later as a study of derealisation drawing from the works of Judith Butler.
Dr Ismael Al-Amoudi
Cardiff University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Accumulation through derealization: How corporate violence remains unchecked, Human Relations, May 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0018726716628970.
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