e International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 00, 2022, 1–7 doi: hps://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijac023 Editorial Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability: Introducing New Players and New eoretical Challenges Hugo van der Merwe * and M. Brinton Lykes † * Hugo van der Merwe: Senior Research Specialist, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Cape Town, South Africa. Email: hvdmerwe@csvr.org.za † M. Brinton Lykes: Professor of Community Cultural Psychology, Co-Director, Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College, USA. Email: lykes@bc.edu © e Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Corporate accountability for complicity in past and ongoing gross violations of human rights and economic crimes is a rapidly growing area of interest in the transitional justice field. Address- ing such violations and their role in fueling conflict and repression is now recognized as a key component of societies’ efforts to come to terms with the past, and, perhaps even more importantly, creating the conditions for non-recurrence of violent conflict and human rights abuses. Truth commissions have increasingly included such economic violations in their mandates, and corporate actors have been the focus of a number of high-profile court cases. Such civil claims and criminal cases appear to offer limited redress thus far, but the normative landscape of transitional justice is shiſting, both at national and international levels. Scholarly interest has spiked, as illustrated in the review essay in this volume by Evelyne Owiye Asaala, which high- lights three new volumes that unpack recent developments. We also see increased civil society mobilization to demand that corporate actors are held to account and contribute to reparations. In some cases, the amounts that corporate actors can or will contribute to compensate survivors dwarf the financial contribution to reparations funds by governments, demonstrating not just their potential contribution to transitional justice, but the scope of their liability for past abuses. 1 Integrating corporate accountability into transitional justice has however proven to be a difficult challenge. On a practical level, the political challenges, the power of international corpo- rations, the gaps in the legal frameworks, etc. are huge obstacles to overcome. At an intellectual level, such an integration also presents difficult questions that challenge the very fundamental assumptions of the transitional justice field. Transitional justice is a field that is continuously confounded by a lack of agreement on its constituent concepts: transition and justice. Both these words have been used as signifiers for 1 For example, mine workers filed a claim against gold-mining companies in South Africa for exposure to unhealthy work conditions during apartheid, which resulted in a selement of over US$300 million, which is 10 times the amount paid by the apartheid government to victims identified by the country’s truth commission. For a detailed analysis of the case, see Cathy-Ann Potgieter, “‘ey Sent Me Home to Die” – Occupational Diseases and the Gold Mining Industry in Post-Apartheid South Africa’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2022). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijtj/ijac023/6776206 by Hugo van der Merwe on 09 November 2022