Line Jespersgaard Jakobsen
Corporate accountability is having a moment. Around the world, governments are introducing stricter corporate due diligence rules, international organizations are debating binding obligations for businesses, and civil society groups are increasingly challenging corporate involvement in human rights abuses.
Yet transitional justice has struggled to keep pace.
Despite growing scholarly attention to corporate crimes and repeated calls to address economic dimensions of conflict, corporations remain largely peripheral to mainstream transitional justice. In my recent article, A corporate turn? Insights from Colombia, the world’s contemporary laboratory for transitional justice (Vol 53, Issue 2, 2026), I explore why this blind spot persists and what Colombia can teach us about overcoming it.
At first glance, Colombia appears to be an unlikely place to find such a blind spot. The country has one of the world’s most ambitious transitional justice architectures, developed in response to more than five decades of armed conflict. It also has vibrant civil society organizations, active debates on business and human rights, and extensive documentation of the relationships between economic actors and armed groups.
If corporate accountability can take root anywhere, Colombia would seem a good candidate.
Yet progress has been limited. While corporate involvement in conflict is widely acknowledged, corporations rarely occupy a central place in transitional justice processes. This raises an important question: why does corporate accountability remain so difficult to achieve, even in contexts where the issue is openly recognized?
Part of the answer lies in the way transitional justice itself has been standardized.
Over the past three decades, transitional justice has become a globally recognized model for addressing past violence. This has advantages. Standardized practices, institutions, and legal frameworks have helped establish important norms against impunity and created mechanisms through which victims can seek truth, justice, and reparations.
At the same time, however, standardization has also narrowed the field’s normative horizons.
Drawing on the work of legal scholar Robert Cover, I argue that transitional justice operates within a particular normative universe, or nomos, that shapes how violence, responsibility, and justice are understood. Within this framework, conflicts are typically interpreted through a state-centred lens. Governments, rebels, military actors, and paramilitaries appear as the primary protagonists, while economic actors are often treated as politically neutral participants standing outside the conflict itself.
This matters because it influences which forms of accountability become imaginable and which remain marginal. Corporate accountability is not merely neglected because of political resistance or institutional weakness. It is also constrained by a dominant narrative that does not easily recognize economic actors as central contributors to violence.
In this sense, the contemporary transitional justice framework can be understood as what Cover would call jurispathic: a system that privileges certain legal meanings while suppressing alternative ways of understanding justice. By defining in advance who counts as a relevant actor and what forms of harm warrant attention, it limits the possibilities for addressing the economic dimensions of conflict.
Colombia illustrates this dynamic particularly well.
The country’s transitional justice landscape contains a remarkable number of institutions, jurisdictions, and accountability mechanisms. On paper, this diversity might appear to create opportunities for broader forms of justice. Yet the reality is more complicated.
Rather than generating the kind of plural legal order that Cover envisioned, Colombia has developed what might be called a statist form of legal plurality. Different institutions operate alongside one another, often with overlapping mandates and fragmented responsibilities. This bureaucratic multiplicity can constrain rather than expand the possibilities for accountability.
The existence of multiple institutions does not automatically create space for alternative understandings of justice. Instead, the same assumptions about conflict and responsibility can be reproduced across different forums. As a result, claims concerning corporate involvement in violence continue to struggle for recognition.
The solution, however, is not simply to stretch existing transitional justice frameworks to accommodate economic harms.
Instead, we need to recognize transitional justice for what it has always been: a political project. Decisions about which actors are investigated, whose experiences become visible, and which forms of accountability are considered legitimate are not merely technical matters. They reflect broader struggles over how societies understand the causes of violence and the meaning of justice.
Acknowledging this opens space for a more pluralist approach to post-conflict accountability. Such an approach would not treat corporate accountability as a secondary or exceptional concern but as an integral part of understanding how violence is enabled, sustained, and reproduced.
This debate is particularly timely. Across the globe, momentum is building around stronger forms of corporate accountability. Colombian actors are actively contributing to international discussions on business and human rights, while domestic civil society organizations continue to push for binding rules and greater accountability for corporate involvement in conflict and abuse.
For that reason, Colombia should be seen not only as a site of post-conflict justice but also as a laboratory for its future development.
The Colombian experience reveals both the limitations of existing transitional justice frameworks and the potential for innovation beyond them. If transitional justice is to meaningfully address the structures that underpin violence, it must move beyond its traditional focus on armed and state actors alone. Doing so requires a more expansive understanding of justice, one capable of confronting not only the political but also the economic dimensions of conflict.