Guest editors André Dao and Shahd Hammouri introduce a special TWAILR symposium reflecting on the archive and legacy of the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 82/2026
‘Third World babies are dying because their mothers bottle feed them with western style infant milk.’
These were the opening words of War on Want’s explosive 1974 report into the promotion and sale of powdered baby milks in the Third World (especially in Africa) by Western corporations, chief among them the Swiss giant Nestlé.
Two years earlier, the President of Chile, Salvador Allende, had given his historical speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he declared that the Third World was faced with a ‘direct confrontation between the large transnational corporations and the states.’ Not only were corporations infringing on state sovereignty by interfering in the political, economic and military decisions of states – in Allende’s account, they were undermining ‘all the world political structure’. Transnational corporations ‘are global organizations that do not depend on any state and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament or any other institution representative of the collective interest.’ In their strident tone and their focus on Western corporate behaviour in the Third World, both ‘The Baby Killer’ report and Allende’s speech captured something of the international zeitgeist of the early 1970s.
It was in this context that the Group of Eminent Experts on Transnational Corporations was established in 1972. In its first report to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Group depicted corporations as complex international networks with vast economic and political influence, closely tied to states of the Global North. It highlighted how corporate power shapes global income distribution, resource allocation, and even diplomatic relations – often through direct or indirect political interference. Rejecting free-market assumptions, the report frames transnational corporations as structural actors whose profit-driven motives exacerbate global inequalities, particularly disadvantaging states in the Global South. The Group of Eminent Experts was, of course, far from being the first to articulate such claims. Beyond Allende’s powerful speech, one could look to Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, published nearly a decade earlier in 1965. Or, indeed, one could look further back, to the very genesis of corporate colonialism, with the chartering of the English and Dutch (VOC) East India Companies and the resistance mounted against corporate authority by non-European legal orders (see for instance the work coming out of a recent workshop on rethinking the VOC’s role in Asia through Asian perspectives and archives). The point here is not to suggest that the Group of Eminent Experts articulated something that colonised peoples had not, but rather that the report represented a significant convergence of long-running Third World resistance to corporate colonialism with an emerging European and North American awareness of, and concern with, corporate power.
On 2 August 1974, the ECOSOC channeled this zeitgeist into institutional form by adopting Resolution 1908 (LVII), which established the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) as a permanent UN body. The preamble to the Resolution framed the UNCTC as part of the agenda of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), an alternative vision of international law premised on the recognition of interrelations and dependencies. The primary function of the UNCTC was to provide research and support for the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations, a body comprising state representatives. The scope of the UNCTC’s work included: compiling databases on corporate activity in the global economy; research on the behaviour of corporations in global markets; providing consultations on the subject matter to ECOSOC and Member States; and developing cooperation programmes relevant to transnational corporations.
The central task on the initial agenda of the UNCTC was the drafting of a United Nations Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations (the Code of Conduct). Negotiations over the Code of Conduct were heavily policed by economically powerful actors including business, mainstream Western media and the OECD states. As a result, the UNCTC did not table a draft until 1983, nearly a decade after its establishment. Even then, the tabled draft bore the marks of the deep divisions between the Third World and the Western states where most transnational corporations were headquartered: unresolved issues were indicated with alternative provisions in square brackets, with the different formulations reflecting Third World and Western positions on whether national or international law should govern questions around corporate property, and whether international or national law should govern corporate conduct. In short, the Third World hoped to make effective their newly established sovereignty by insisting that their domestic law should govern corporate property, while an international law of corporate conduct would prevent corporations from playing states off against each other in a regulatory race to the bottom. The wealthy Western states, on the other hand, wanted the precise opposite: they wanted to protect corporate property from nationalisation by elevating corporate property rights to the international sphere, beyond the reach of national laws, while leaving the regulation of corporate conduct to a patchwork of domestic laws.
Fierce opposition from business, liberal economists, and Western mainstream media – combined with the weakening of the Third World’s bargaining position thanks to the debt crisis, oil glut and the onslaught of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes – meant that the draft Code of Conduct languished at the UNCTC. Successive revisions were made to the Code of Conduct to make it more favourable to capitalist interests, essentially making it an instrument aimed at encouraging foreign investment. Despite this, the draft Code was formally abandoned in 1992. The UNCTC itself lasted only another year, when it was transferred over in 1993 to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, where it was implemented by UNCTAD’s Division on Investment, Technology and Enterprise Development as the Programme on Transnational Corporations.
Today, when the UNCTC is remembered at all, it tends to be remembered as a cautionary tale. For instance, John Ruggie, the architect of the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, recalled the UNCTC’s draft Code of Conduct as an example of the inevitable failure of more radical efforts to regulate corporations on the international plane. This perception appears to suggest that ameliorating human suffering while leaving in place the structures of corporate and imperial power that cause that suffering is the most we can hope for.
The UNCTC’s work has never been more relevant. From the predations of Big Tech firms through the corporate backers of right-wing populists to the fossil fuel giants fuelling climate change, corporate power is deeply implicated in every aspect of the global polycrisis. This is not a new phenomenon, but rather is part of a longer intimacy between company and state. As Dao and Pahuja have written, what is often glossed as corporate ‘corruption’ – or of too much corporate power vis a vis the state – actually ‘represents what we might call empire coming home: a technology of governance from the colonial encounter, used to extend a form of public-private rule over distant peoples, is now turned inwards, upon the state’s “own” people.’ There is, then, a direct line connecting today’s struggles for corporate accountability with earlier struggles against corporate power – to the UNCTC, and beyond. As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese noted in her landmark 2025 report detailing corporate complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and genocide against the Palestinian people, ‘colonial endeavours and associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector’.
Launching and Engaging with the UNCTC Archive
This symposium was born out of an encounter at the fringes of the UN Treaty Talks on Business and Human Rights with one of the former employees of the UNCTC, Harris Gleckman, who generously offered to share its archive. The symposium seeks to draw attention to the rich work of the UNCTC not as the story of an inevitable failure, nor as the history of a heroic victory, but as a potential resource for contemporary struggles against corporate power. The five contributions to the symposium each engage with materials from the UNCTC archive, which is now hosted by the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. (The archive remains a work in progress – anyone with copies of the missing documents should get in touch with the Laureate Program.)
Wanshu Cong, for instance, focuses in her contribution on a 1982 UNCTC technical paper on ‘transborder data flows’ (TDF). As Cong notes, the governance of cross-border data flows has been a major point of debate in contemporary data governance circles. That debate tends today to be conducted on rather narrow terms. Cong’s reading of the technical paper reveals that in the 1970s and early 1980s, ‘when ideas about the information society began circulating and yet the social implications of data were not firmly solidified’, it was possible to understand data flows not as somehow naturalised or reified but rather as socially specific phenomena within the political economy of capitalism. Yet, as Cong shows, while this understanding of TDF allowed the UNCTC to see a structural asymmetry between North and South in the international pattern of TDF, it nevertheless took a ‘reformist approach towards the Third World’s demands after the heyday of the NIEO’.
The UNCTC archive can also reveal something about what Caitlin Murphy calls corporate ‘counter-strategies’ to the Third World’s NIEO agenda. In her contribution, Murphy focuses on a joint 1978 report produced by the UNCTC and the UN Industrial Development Organisation on transnational corporations and the processing of raw materials. That report details a number of corporate responses to Third World attempts to change the terms of trade and assert permanent sovereignty over resources, including efforts to destabilise governments that threatened their interests and the pursuit of significant compensation for the purported expropriation of their property. Murphy highlights one particular response: the turn to ‘value-added production’ which, she argues, augured the wider ‘corporate practice of retaining control over formerly colonial resources’ by developing ‘a supply chain economy’.
Kalika Mehta argues that internal UNCTC ‘overview’ reports from 1982, 1983 and 1985 chart a shift from an explicitly political, NIEO‑inspired project of disciplining transnational corporations in the service of redistribution towards a depoliticised, technocratic language of managing and measuring their effects. It shows how, in 1982, the Centre still framed TNCs as actors embedded in structures of dependency and spoke in transformative terms about development and structural change, but by 1983 this language had been reframed into apparently neutral goals of ‘increasing knowledge’ and ‘ascertaining’ contributions to existing strategies, reflecting Northern pressure to keep the Centre’s work narrowly ‘technical.’ By 1985 the reports had become stripped‑down catalogues of studies, focused on trends, sectors and governmental negotiating capacity – with social conflict, labour, human rights and community struggles largely absent, signalling both the erosion of the NIEO’s emancipatory ethos and the reorientation of the UNCTC towards servicing Southern states’ managerial needs rather than articulating popular demands.
Herein, for all that the UNCTC was aligned with the Third World call for a NIEO, its research and other activities remained rooted in capitalist realism. In their contribution, River Baars sounds an important note of caution about the radical futures foreclosed by the UNCTC from the very outset. Baars does so through a close reading of a series of documents leading up to the establishment of the UNCTC alongside the work of the Marxist, Pan-African and decolonial scholar, organiser and teacher Walter Rodney. Baars’ reading shows how the intellectual and institutional framework within which the UNCTC began its work took corporate capitalism for granted, and addressed itself to ameliorating the worst effects of a thoroughly rotten system rather than imagining and building an alternative. Alongside Rodney, Baars’ contribution also points to the work of Marxist economist Stephen Hymer – who testified before the UN Group of Eminent Persons that would go on to recommend the establishment of the UNCTC – as more promising sources of just futures.
Looking to the future, Shahd Hammouri asks: what can we learn from the UNCTC to answer contemporary questions on corporate accountability in war? She calls for a two‑track strategy: reviving the UNCTC’s earlier, more stringent principles that subordinated profit to peoples’ rights, while also exploiting the existing regime by treating atrocities as legal, financial and reputational risks for firms — for example through a UN public tribunal that would document corporate involvement and signal those risks to markets, drawing on the precedent of public hearings on TNCs in apartheid South Africa and occupied Namibia that led to findings and recommendations on divestment, embargoes and reparations. Hammouri highlights how that earlier panel abandoned narrow notions of direct liability and instead analysed corporations’ direct and structural roles across sectors (arms, IT, automobiles, extractives, oil and gas, finance). It inferred a duty of care not to worsen people’s precarity in war economies, and treated even ‘mere presence’ as endorsement of an illegal regime, thereby challenging the myth of corporate neutrality in contexts of systemic illegality. She concludes that this tribunal model offers both a practical and discursive framework for re‑imagining corporate involvement in war today – positioning corporations as powerful, networked actors whose choices can sustain or constrain atrocity – and that Palestine represents a critical opportunity to revive such justice‑oriented approaches to global corporate power.
Read together, these pieces examine the alternative epistemological vantage point embraced in the early days of the UNCTC, while also highlighting the historical, institutional, and economic constraints that contributed to its demise. Our hope is that, in this moment of radical political change, the archive helps to bridge a historical and theoretical continuity in the struggle to put people before profit.
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