Shaming the Shameless? Campaigning Against Corporations

Abstract

In 1998, a small NGO based in London, Global Witness, published a report that showed how oil and diamonds fueled the seemingly endless civil war in Angola. A few years later, Ian Smillie, a Canadian humanitarian working in Sierra Leone, founded the NGO Partnership Africa Canada and published an investigation into the role of the diamond industry in financing the horrific violence there. A German coalition of NGOs called Fatal Transactions quickly took up the issue of diamonds that financed war, as did most of the major human rights organizations and many smaller ones. They called out the diamond industry for its complicity in bloodshed in these and other African countries, targeting one corporation—DeBeers—in particular. Six years later, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme was instituted to regulate and control conflict diamonds.