Towards socially sustainable globalization: reflections on responsible contracting and the UN guiding principles on business and human rights

The global governance style and prose of the United Nations system often mystifies the fact that what is enunciated as consensus of the peoples often the world is really what the community of states agrees to as a “soft” law that creates no state obligations excepting as the work of future time. Of course, a historian of international law fully recognizes the power of the exceptional when “soft” law becomes hardened (like the declaration in the right to development) and hard law is softened (as in times of “development” and the global war on “terror”). Oxymoron upon oxymoron continue stockpile the UN global governance prose.