Opening

When the first cohort of the International Doctoral Programme in Business and Human Rights at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg convened its closing conference in autumn 2025, it did so at a peculiar moment in the life of the field. The conference marked the completion of the first cohort of around twenty doctoral researchers in what is, to our knowledge, the largest dedicated BHR doctoral programme to date — a small intellectual generation reaching the end of its training just as the BHR landscape it was trained for begins to shift.

That shift has produced profound changes. For instance, the European Commission’s Omnibus I package has narrowed the personal and material scope of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, extending timelines and softening obligations only months after the Directive’s adoption. Meanwhile the second Trump administration has retreated from Environmental, Social & Governance(ESG) diplomacy, and reframed corporate accountability as a regulatory burden. National coalitions that once supported mandatory due diligence are fragmenting. On the other hand, law makers in other parts of the world are thinking about introducing or expanding Due Diligence related laws. In South Korea and Thailand, new laws on Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence are in preparation while in Indonesia the initiative to draft presidential regulation on enforcement of corporate compliance with BHR has been approved. While for years, there seemed to be a clear trend towards the expansion of the hard law architecture underlying BHR, the field has been entering a new of phase shaped by a non-uniform development.

This is the moment into which this symposium speaks. Three contributions, resulting from reflections from the conference have been developed here for a Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ) blog series, argue that, as the field is entering into its next phase, BHR must prioritize a return to its foundational principles. Using three different idioms, this BHRJ blog series dissects the substance of BHR that must be held onto when the procedural scaffolding wobbles. Otgontuya Davaanyam writes on narrative and legal empowerment; Milena Störmer and Eklavya Vasudev on justification and the normative core of BHR; and Kania Mezariani Guzaimi, Stephanie Regalia and Bruna Singh on art and cultural expression. Each piece identifies a different dimension at which BHR has been procedurally hollowed out, and each proposes the recovery move appropriate to its dimension. Taken together, they sketch what we might call a “thicker” conception of voice in BHR operating simultaneously at the level of evidence, reason, governance design, and expressive form.

A Shared Diagnosis: Procedural Hollowing-out Across Three Dimensions

All three contributions point to issues that are structural. They stress the displacement of normative substance by procedural form but locate it on a different dimension of BHR governance. Setting these dimensions out explicitly clarifies how the contributions fit together.

The epistemic dimension — whose accounts of harm count as evidence. Davaanyam diagnoses what, borrowing from Byung-Chul Han, she calls a “crisis of narration”: a structural asymmetry in which technocratic and corporate framings dominate the production of evidence, while lived experiences struggle to be recognised as legally cognisable harm. The procedural infrastructure of risk assessment, modelling and disclosure narrows what counts as a knowable harm.

The normative dimension — whose interests bind corporate conduct as constraint. Störmer and Vasudev show how HRDD translates ethical commitments into a language of identifying, assessing and managing risks, and how that translation quietly absorbs the constraint character of rights into a logic of optimisation. The procedural infrastructure of severity-likelihood-leverage analysis substitutes for the moral question of whether a given conduct can be justified to those whose rights are at stake.

The expressive dimension — what counts as a legitimate form of voice. Guzaimi, Regalia and Singh identify a less remarked-on form of the same dynamic: BHR engagement is structured around formal, westernised, written modes of dialogue — conferences, reports, stakeholder consultations conducted in institutional settings — which systematically side-line communities whose experiences are communicated through storytelling, performance, visual art, or culturally embedded practice. The procedural infrastructure of “stakeholder engagement” is itself a culturally specific form.

What unites these three diagnoses is conceptual structure. At each dimension, a procedure designed to operationalise BHR has come to answer a question that should remain open: at the epistemic dimension, whose harm matters; at the normative dimension, what conduct is defensible; at the expressive dimension, what form of voice is heard.

Three Recoveries

Set against this shared diagnosis, each contribution proposes the recovery move appropriate to its dimension. The three dimensions are heuristic centres rather than strict containers. We surface those overlaps in the integrative claim below.

Narrative as evidence (epistemic recovery). Davaanyam treats storytelling not as rhetorical embellishment but as constitutive of legal reasoning. Cases such as Lliuya v RWE, Asmania v Holcim and the Filipino survivors’ claim against Shell show how affected communities translate diffuse global harms into concrete, attributable injuries — anchoring abstract data within the doctrinal categories of foreseeability, causation and duty of care. Her contribution invites BHR to treat affected-stakeholder narratives as a required input to risk identification, verifiable and procedurally embedded rather than added as colour after the fact. The recovery is epistemic in that it expands what counts as evidence without abandoning evidentiary discipline.

Justification as constraint (normative recovery). Störmer and Vasudev’s intervention operates a dimension deeper – at the level of reasoning. Where a risk-based reading treats CSDDD obligations as a graduated calculation of severity, leverage and remediation cost, a justificatory reading — drawing on Mureinik’s “culture of justification” and Arendt on thoughtlessness — reverses the order of inquiry: the first question is whether continued conduct can be defended in terms that those affected, treated as ends, could be expected to accept. Procedures are not abandoned but reoriented: they “operate as sites of justification” rather than as substitutes for it. Their treatment of conflict-affected operations, where HRDD reaches its ethical limits, makes the stakes of the recovery tangible. The recovery is normative: it restores the moral question that procedural compliance had begun to answer in its stead.

Cultural expression as voice and as right (expressive recovery). Guzaimi, Regalia and Singh make the most expansive recovery move in the symposium. Their contribution operates simultaneously at two levels that BHR scholarship has tended to keep apart: as a critique of the formal, Westernised, written modes of dialogue through which BHR engagement is conducted, and as a substantive argument about the place of economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights — and the right to cultural participation under ICESCR Article 15 in particular — within the BHR project. Recovering the parallel and largely unwritten history of cultural contestation that has accompanied the field, from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Rotten English to capoeira, from cement-in-feet protests to community theatre and participatory mural projects, they treat art not as decoration but as a legitimate medium for surfacing the emotional, intergenerational and culturally embedded dimensions of corporate-related harm. Drawing on Freirean and decolonial scholarship, they ask not only who gets a seat at the table but what counts as a legitimate form of voice — and they connect that question to a deeper one the field has been slow to confront: whose conception of culture, dignity and well-being structures the rights BHR claims to protect. Their concrete proposals — community theatre in stakeholder engagement, the Bakar Batu tradition in grievance design, the reshaping of BHR forums around exhibitions and storytelling — are operational rather than aspirational. The recovery is expressive in form and ESC-rights-substantive in content: it expands what counts as engagement, and it expands what counts as the rights at stake.

The Integrated Agenda

The three contributions, taken together, reframe the rightsholder from an object of protection to a co-author of governance. Whether as plaintiff-narrator, as the worker whose acceptance is the criterion of justification, as the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) participant who drafts the code and monitors its application, or as the community whose cultural form structures consultation, the rightsholder appears across these pieces as an epistemic and normative agent. This is a reassertion of the BHR’s original premise — that those affected by economic globalisation are not consultees but the primary bearers of rights.

Although each contribution is organised around a single primary dimension, each of the three engage substantive Economic Social Cultural rights at points the field has tended to under-attend. The proceduralisation of BHR has been particularly costly at the ESC end of the rights spectrum, where harms are slower, more diffuse, and harder to render auditable. Recovering substance is therefore not only a question of how BHR operates but of which rights its operations reliably reach.

What the three recoveries describe, taken together, is what persists in times of non-uniform parallel expansion and contraction of legal frameworks around the world. When the Omnibus revisions narrow CSDDD’s scope, when the US administration weakens HRDD enforcement, or when new laws may be introduced in South Korea or Thailand, the substantive practices the three pieces identify remain available as anchors. They do not require the procedural scaffolding to operate; it was always the substance the scaffolding was meant to carry.

These observations structure a forward agenda:

• Epistemic: treat affected-stakeholder narratives as a required, verifiable input to HRDD risk identification, embedded in the legal definition of meaningful engagement rather than left to corporate discretion.
• Normative: reorient due diligence around the justificatory question — can this be defended to those whose rights are at stake? — and treat that question as one that must be posed continuously, not resolved once.
• Expressive: redesign BHR forums, consultations, grievance mechanisms and reparation processes to accommodate culturally embedded forms of voice — not as a supplement to the existing format, but as a reconfiguration of it — and treat cultural rights as substantive rights within the BHR project, not as accommodations to it.

Coda

The closing conference of FAU’s BHR doctoral programme brought together a generation of researchers who entered the field during a decade of rapid growth. They are now beginning their careers at a time when the hard-law framework of business and human rights is changing in uncertain ways. The three contributions in this symposium all speak to that moment. They ask questions about evidence, justification, and expression. These are not the questions of a settled field. And the contributions do not provide all the answers. But they show where BHR scholarship may need to go next, through the current turbulence and beyond it.