We are pleased to co-host a webinar launching the archive of the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), bringing together Wanshu Cong, Caitlin Murphy, Kalika Mehta, River Baars, and Juliana Rodrigues de Senna, introduced by André Dao and Shahd Hammouri with concluding remarks by Sundhya Pahuja. The discussion revisits the UNCTC’s history as part of the broader struggle to put people before profit, tracing its origins in Global South resistance to corporate power and its attempt to develop international tools for regulating transnational corporations.
Thursday 7 July 2026
9am London // 10am Berlin // 11am Jerusalem // 3pm Bandung // 6pm Melbourne
Register here for the webinar.
The webinar seeks to critically reintroduce the archive to contemporary discourses on corporate accountability and business and human rights. The UNCTC materials offer a rare record of a continuing struggle to confront corporate power at the international level, and they illuminate debates that remain urgent today: data governance, resource extraction, corporate counter-strategies, the depoliticisation of development discourse, and the structural role of corporations in war, occupation, and apartheid. Rather than treating the UNCTC as a historical artefact, the archive opens up a historical and analytical resource for contemporary struggles over accountability, sovereignty, and redistribution.
At a moment when corporate power is driving climate breakdown, militarism, and widening global inequality, the archive helps recover a longer history of contestation and imagination. It invites us to revisit unfinished debates about how law might meaningfully constrain transnational corporations and support struggles for justice across the Global South.
This webinar is co-hosted by TWAILR, the Transnational Institute and Melbourne Law School’s Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law.
Read the TWAILR symposium on the UNCTC:
André Dao & Shahd Hammouri – Launching the Archive of the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations: The Struggle to Put People before Profit
Wanshu Cong – Transnational Corporations at the Dawn of the Information Society: The UNCTC, Transborder Data Flows, and the Global South
Caitlin Murphy – Corporations and the supply chain as political ordering: a story from the UNIDO and UNCTC archives
Kalika Mehta — Between the Lines: What the UNCTC’s Research Plans Reveal about Shifting Power Dynamics
River Baars — Walter Rodney and the radical futures the UNCTC foreclosed
Shahd Hammouri — The UN must establish a Public Tribunal for Corporations involved in the Israeli War Economy: Lessons from the UNCTC
