Anja Matwijkiw

Campus:

IU Northwest

Anja Matwijkiw is a Professor of Ethics & Human Rights at the Indiana University Graduate School and the Philosophy Program at Indiana University Northwest. 

Professor Matwijkiw earned a 6-year research degree (Magister) from Copenhagen University, Denmark (1989) and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England (1997). During her time in England, Professor Matwijkiw also served as a Carlsberg Research Fellow and Carlsberg Researcher at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, England (1990-1995). She completed her postdoc at the University of Chicago where she also was an instructor for the Graham School of General Studies, a visiting lecturer at the Human Rights Program, and a faculty advisor for M.A. students at the Center for International Studies (1998-2003).

“Stakeholder jurisprudence” is the topic of Professor Matwijkiw's research project. Stakeholder jurisprudence is a position on the philosophy of international law, more precisely, United Nations law. As the name suggests, stakeholder jurisprudence is connected with stakeholder theory, which the philosopher R. Edward Freeman helped to develop for a subfield of strategic business management, namely corporate social responsibility.[1] This project takes its starting point in the fact that the international norms the United Nations has established as a global organization include corporate social responsibility, as illustrated by the Global Compact (2000).[2] The United Nations also refers expressly to “stakeholders” in more recent instruments, e.g., Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.[3]

The United Nations has adopted other terms and ideas from stakeholder theory, enough to make it possible to talk about a new millennium trend. However, so far, no thinker on the philosophy of United Nations law has explained what is involved in the transition from stakeholder theory to stakeholder jurisprudence, let alone tried to formulate a jurisprudence outgrowth and mode of interpretation. One reason for this, Matwijkiw plans to argue, is due to the sporadic and rudimentary pattern of the trend itself. The United Nations adopted and applied the stakeholder way of communicating and signaling international law directions without qualifying this in terms of so-called “broad” and “narrow” premises and implications, i.e., without addressing the competing versions of stakeholder theory which can be found in the literature and, furthermore, without contributing to the spillover dispute in legal doctrine about philosophical dimensions and humanistic values that arguably belong under ethics. Therefore, the different imprints from stakeholder theory must be ordered in a systematic account before it is possible to clarify and, if necessary, criticize and correct one or more of the competing outlooks on the basis of a careful study of the conceptual and normative framework for United Nations law. The latter task entails analytical and logical inquiries that partly rely on a reconstructive methodology since stakeholder theory was not originally intended to inform and guide legal discourse and strategy.

In one important sense, all stakeholder terms and ideas with a bearing on international law are up in the air as open-ended variables. While the project aims to show that a test of narrow versus broad stakeholder versions can be tilted in favor of broad outlooks, this claim predictably leads to challenges within public international law. As a domain, it entails consideration of State responsibility. This raises a central question of whether the stakeholder trend constitutes a general and consistent paradigm-shift. If it does not, the transition from stakeholder theory to stakeholder jurisprudence in the context of United Nations law may not have sufficient support. The project assumes that such skepticism can be countered, though. Public international law is the domain the United Nations set out to regulate with international norms as early as 1945, with principles like “justice and international law.”[4] Even more to the point, State responsibility covers “all international obligations of the State and not only those owed to other States” according to the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with Commentaries (2001). The obligations span respect for equal sovereignty, humanitarian rules, international core crimes (e.g., crimes against humanity) and international human rights; and the two last-mentioned also appear under the corporate social responsibility headline. Consequently, the project will identify a bridge between the two forms of responsibility, and the bridge extends to emerging and universally applicable norms like “ecocide” and “grand corruption” which affect basic human values and survival. While the narrow versus broad debate and divide repeats itself in legal doctrine, the hypothesis is that there is in fact a basis upon which to take the step no legal philosopher has taken yet: to defend the explanatory potential of stakeholder jurisprudence as a position. The project will show that stakeholder jurisprudence can provide more than a compass for interpretation. It can function as an antidote to the monopoly held by “the highly narrow specialist” at the expense of “the legal generalist” who also considers philosophy and ethics.[5]

[1] R. Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (1984).

[2] United Nations Global Compact, https://unglobalcompact.org/about/governance.

[3] Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n15/291/89/pdf/n1529189.pdf.

[4] Charter of the United Nations, https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf.

[5] M. Cherif Bassiouni, A Functional Approach to “General Principles of International Law,” 11(3) Michigan Journal of International Law, 768, 802 (1990).