In this interview and Q&A, Harvard Professor John Ruggie, author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, provided insight into his groundbreaking work, contending that it is simply good business for business to be just, in the sense of it being principled.

Moderator

Chris Jochnick, Director of Private Sector at Oxfam America, Washington DC, USA

Interviewee

John Ruggie, author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights; Harvard Professor.

Professor John Ruggie, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights, is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Trained as a political scientist, he has made significant intellectual contributions to the study of international relations, focusing on the impact of economic and other forms of globalisation on global rule-making and the emergence of new rule-makers. He is the author of Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (Norton 2013) in which he explains that he deliberately sought to bring new players into the business and human rights debate, the most consequential of whom were corporate lawyers. He is identified as one of the 25 most influential international relations scholars in the US and Canada according to surveys published in Foreign Policy magazine.