Bhopal and the Boundaries of Harm in Business and Human Rights: A Feminist Analysis

Abstract This article examines how harm is understood in the Business and Human Rights (BHR) field. It argues that dominant conceptualizations of harm embodied in BHR legal frameworks prioritise translating it into discrete, temporally bounded and spatially contained units of assessment. This renders certain forms of harm structurally invisible. Through an analysis of key conceptual doctrines informing the BHR field, the authors show how harm is characterised to prioritise attribution and manageability, whilst excluding its cumulative, relational and intergenerational forms. Drawing from the Bhopal disaster as a ‘telling instance’ and illustrating the implications of this for survivors of industrial disaster, the article demonstrates how this characterization of harm obscures ongoing depletion, and particularly the gendered burden of social reproduction. It then utilises and further develops the concept of harm as depletion, showing how it captures the erosion of life-sustaining conditions over time. The authors argue for re-orienting legal engagement beyond pragmatic risk management and towards recognition of structurally produced, ongoing harm, by grounding their analysis in critical human rights scholarship and TWAIL to propose an alternative interpretive frame of embedded solidarity. They conceive of this as a means through which to further develop new approaches to the BHR field.