We are pleased to announce 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.

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 will be co-hosted by TWAILR, the Transnational Institute and Melbourne Law School’s Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law.