Art and cultural expression have always been strategic media through which resistance to injustice expresses itself.  Yet this form of expression, although protected under both the ICCPR (Article 19) and the ICESCR (Article 15),  is overlooked in the most influential norms in the business and human rights (BHR) movement. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises fail to explicitly reference art or cultural expression. Both mention the importance of ‘culturally appropriate’ channels of communication, be that for stakeholder engagement or access to remedy, but fail to illustrate how that can look like in practice.  

If engagement with affected rightsholders is meant to be meaningful, why not look precisely to those media whose very purpose it is to carry meaning? Why is artistic expression absent from the normative and practical guidance on the business responsibility to respect human rights? And how could this be remedied?  This blog post answers those very questions. It highlights that artistic expression has always been on a parallel track to the development of the international BHR agenda, but never fully acknowledged as a legitimate component.  Ultimately, the formats through which human rights due diligence and BHR forums take place should be shaped by local customs.  The future of the field lies in translating that awareness into practice.

The parallel histories of cultural contestation against corporate power and the development of the BHR agenda

Art and cultural expression have always been present at the defining moments which have shaped the history of the BHR movement. From protest songs to cement-in-feet demonstrations, through film-making and performance art in mining-affected communities, cultural expression has always been a medium through which people communicate the weight of their suffering to those with the power to act. The relationship between art and systems of economic exploitation is not incidental, it is generative. Cultural expressions often emerge from conditions of oppression. Capoeira, developed by enslaved Africans in Brazil, encoded resistance within movement, disguising combat training as dance precisely because open defiance was too dangerous to survive. Similarly, traditional Indonesian dances bear the marks of colonial expropriation, their meanings and forms altered by the economic and political systems that surrounded them. Art activism has long functioned as a dynamic force for advancing social justice, using artistic expression to challenge systemic inequalities and inspire collective action.

Some of the most poignant figures in the fight for corporate accountability were creators themselves. Think of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist executed in 1995 following his campaign against Shell’s operations in Ogoniland.  Lawsuits initiated by his family against Shell for the company’s alleged complicity with the Nigerian military dictatorship in power at the time marked novel attempts at transnational litigation to hold parent companies accountable for the human rights harms of their subsidiaries.  In addition to his activism, Saro-Wiwa was a defiant writer, too. In his novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, Saro-Wiwa purposefully crafted a story of disillusionment with war mixing pidgin English, standard English and broken English, which he named “Rotten English”, but in fact was a reclaiming of the language spoken through mixed heritage of local dialects and “conventional” literary English.

Saro-Wiwa’s execution was strongly condemned through a vote in the UN General Assembly. International institutions took note, and the BHR movement remembers the tragedy in corporate complicity. Perhaps the lesson would be fully learned if the movement could better remember the specificities of Ogoni contestation at the time. What if historical accounts of BHR also started memorializing cultural expressions of affected communities?

Reconnecting with the social normative dimension of business and human rights

For the past decade, legal developments in the field of business and human rights, such as the adoption of human rights due diligence laws in Europe, have animated much of the practical incentive for companies seeking to fulfil their responsibility to respect human rights. But one should not neglect the development of BHR as a social norm. The UNGPs emphasize that corporations must comply with all applicable laws and have the responsibility to respect human rights irrespective of a state’s willingness or ability to enforce the law.  Such responsibility is considered a “transnational social norm”. The more the public accepts the social dimension of BHR, the more opportunities for its implementation despite the lack of legal developments in certain contexts. 

However, how can BHR norms be implemented globally when social norms vary in different countries and cultures?  Linking the social normative dimension of BHR to culturally specific contexts could help enforce it at the local level and transform it based on the needs and interests of the local communities as embedded in their economic, social, and cultural rights. Transforming BHR through local culture and arts would help BHR norms be accepted by local communities instead of being viewed as attempts to impose new unfamiliar norms locally. There are many studies that highlight the local agency in transforming norms, where local communities are not merely recipients of global norms but are key actors in translating such norms into the local contexts, also known as ‘norm localization’. Culture and arts could be used to transform BHR and, at the same time, be used to resist corporate-related human rights violations. For example, in Indonesia, new norms were often adapted to the specific local cultural-specific contexts in order to be accepted by communities. This involved using the local languages and merging international norms with cultural traditions. 

It is also important to highlight that local cultural traditions and arts are not static but shift throughout time. Thus, culture and arts should be perceived as opportunities for transforming social norms instead of barriers. Recognizing the usefulness of BHR in its social dimension, instead of fixating on its legal definition, could help the spread of its implementation in various cultural contexts. The development of BHR as legal norms and social norms should go hand in hand to complement each other in the long run. Insisting on this social dimension also helps to consider the practical implications of linking BHR with artistic and cultural expression.

  
Embracing creativity and cultural customs in the practice of business and human rights

If BHR is to move beyond a purely procedural or compliance-driven exercise, then BHR norms must also rethink how engagement with affected communities takes place. At present, many forms of engagement in BHR – forums, consultations, due diligence processes – are structured around formal, often Westernized modes of dialogue: conferences, reports, stakeholder meetings conducted in institutional settings. These formats risk excluding not only voices from rightsholders, especially those in the Global South, but also entire forms of expression.    

Too often, the question is framed as who gets a seat at the table. Less attention is taken as to what counts as a legitimate form of voice. When engagement is limited to written submissions or formal consultation processes, it privileges those already fluent in these systems. It sidelines communities whose experiences are communicated through storytelling, music, performance, visual art, or other culturally embedded practices. Here, decolonial approaches to community engagement offer important considerations. Community consultation can often follow a “     banking model” of knowledge (we draw here on the expression developed by Paulo Freire in the context of education design), where experts deposit knowledge into passive recipients. It is about creating spaces where people can express their realities in their own terms, and through that build a mutual process of co-creating knowledge which informs decision-making.

Applying this insight to BHR suggests that human rights due diligence should not merely collect perspectives, but should be co-created through culturally relevant forms of expression. This could mean: 

1. Integrating artistic and cultural practices into stakeholder engagement, such as community theatre, cinema, participatory video, or mural projects that allow affected individuals to narrate their experiences collectively.
2. Rethinking BHR forums and conferences to include exhibitions, performances, or storytelling sessions led by affected communities, rather than limiting participation to panel discussions and policy debates.
3. Designing grievance and reparation mechanisms that are accessible through non-written forms (such as the Bakar Batu tradition in Papua), recognizing that not all harms can be easily translated into legal or technical language.
4. Ensuring that human rights due diligence processes are shaped by local customs, including how communities traditionally communicate harm, memory, and resistance.

Engaging with art is not simply an aesthetic addition to existing processes. It is a way of capturing what “check-box” compliance will often miss. Artistic expression can surface dimensions of harm – emotional, cultural, intergenerational – that are often invisible in standard risk assessments. Ultimately, if corporate respect for human rights is to be a lived experience, it requires a shift in mindset for all actors of BHR: from consultation to dialogue, from representation to participation, and from abstraction to lived reality. Reimagining the future of BHR through cultural and artistic expression is an invitation to rethink whose knowledge counts, how it is expressed, and what it truly means to listen.