Inclusion as Strategy: Transnational Corporations, Human Rights Discourses, and Political Consumerism through a TWAIL Lens

This thesis examines how transnational corporations, operating as actors of private global governance, incorporate and instrumentalize human rights and diversity discourses in response to political consumerism pressures. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that combines international law, political economy, and critical theory, the study argues that corporate engagement with human rights is predominantly driven by reputational and market logics rather than by structural normative commitments. Applying a TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) lens, the analysis reveals that such practices remain confined within a neoliberal and geopolitical rationality, in which human rights are appropriated selectively and contingently, reproducing global hierarchies under the guise of progressive narratives. This critical framework is then applied to a single qualitative case study of Disney's Stories Matter initiative, whose trajectory — from institutional ambition to institutional silence — is examined through the company's corporate sustainability reports, demonstrating how diversity operates as a flexible symbolic commodity subject to corporate recalibration in response to competing market pressures. The research contributes to Business and Human Rights scholarship by integrating TWAIL critique with political consumerism theory and Gramscian hegemony analysis in the cultural entertainment sector, exposing the structural limits of private cultural governance as a substitute for binding public regulation and gesturing toward a transcivilizational normative horizon as the necessary direction of travel for a genuinely inclusive Business and Human Rights agenda.