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Seeking Justice: Access to Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuse explores victims' varying experiences in seeking remedy mechanisms for corporate human rights abuse. It puts forward a novel theory about the possibility of productive contestation and explores governance outcomes for victims of corporate human rights abuse across Latin America. This foundation informs three pathways that victims can use to press for their rights: working within the institutional environment, capitalizing on corporate characteristics, and elevating voices. Seeking Justice challenges the common assumptions in the governance gap literature and argues, instead, that greater democratic practices can emerge from productive contestation. This book brings to bear tough questions about the trade-offs associated with economic growth and conflicting values around human dignity-questions that are very salient today, as citizens around the globe contemplate the type of democratic and economic systems that might better prepare us for tomorrow.

Why do groups form to influence policy outcomes? Classic notions of collective action tell us that a small number of homogeneous individuals are more likely to organize and thus achieve their preferred policy outcomes. Yet, this is not always reflected in the empirical record as external factors, such as the state, influence the costs of organizing. Instead, the traditional collective action literature largely assumes a purely rational or passive state. While the institutional entrepreneurship literature highlights the key role these actors can play in shaping institutions and, at times, organizational fields, it does not seek to explain why change agents appear in some instances and not others. This article seeks to fill this theoretical gap by drawing on the co-evolution literature, which helps explain the variation in group formation by underscoring how the state and institutional entrepreneurs shape one another. Utilizing rich qualitative data from the microfinance industry in Brazil and Mexico, this research asserts that the formation of microfinance associations is a function of actors' ability to access the state, which results in distinct processes: co-evolution by isolation or co-optation. This process has subsequent implications for institutional change, policy outcomes, and, ultimately, the distribution of power and prospects of development within emerging economies.

The Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS) has had a profound effect on industrialization and innovation, as well as access to medicines in cases of public health crisis such as HIV/AIDS. However, compliance with TRIPS has varied in developing countries, despite heightened international pressure. For instance, Brazil has pursued a coherent approach to its HIV/AIDS health crisis, while India has failed to take care of its HIV patients despite late compliance with the TRIPS agreement and the presence of business firms that produce the generic medicines for HIV/AIDS. This article suggests that divergence in TRIPS compliance is the result of a linkage politics, in which global variables (global rules, global supply chains and global networks) reach into the domestic political economy to alter the interests and capabilities of domestic actors. Indian pharmaceutical firms have developed external and export interests that lower incentives for the Indian state to design a nationally relevant public health policy, while the Brazilian health movement with its societal and external linkages puts pressure on the Brazilian state to defend the interests of its HIV patients even at the cost of patents. We conclude by suggesting that linkage politics is better at helping us understand compliance with international agreements than existing explanations, with important consequences for the effectiveness of international institutions.

Contemporary models of political economy suggest that reforms intended to reduce grievances should curtail unrest, a perspective at odds with many traditional accounts of reform and rebellion. We explore the impact of reform on rebellion with a new data set on peasant disturbances in 19th-century Russia. Using a difference-in-differences design that exploits the timing of various peasant reforms, we document a large increase in disturbances among former serfs following the Emancipation Reform of 1861, a development counter to reformers' intent. Our analysis suggests that this outcome was driven by peasants' disappointment with the reform's design and implementation—the consequence of elite capture in the context of a generally weak state—and heightened expectations of what could be achieved through coordinated action. Reform-related disturbances were most pronounced in provinces where commune organization facilitated collective action and where fertile soil provoked contestation over land.