Chapter 7 draws together the findings of the book concerning the impact of NJM interventions on community and worker struggles to achieve remedy. Lessons are drawn from both widespread failure and small gains. ‘Success’ is more likely, in the sense that aggrieved communities and worker groups are more likely to attain the outcomes they pursue, when NJM interventions facilitate the influence of communities within wider fields of struggle. These interventions include NJMs enhancing the credibility and public awareness of the alleged rights violations, strengthening alliances between actors supportive of redress, leveraging aspects of state and business power that empowered those alliances and enhancing claimants’ skills in advocacy and negotiation. Nonetheless, effective NJM interventions depend on the characteristics of the relevant field of struggle, such as distributions of power within a given supply chain, distributions of business and civil society access to state power and prior histories of campaigning and political organisation in particular sectors and locations.

This chapter examines human rights policies and their relationship to conceptions of the national interest, focusing on the 2001 establishment and subsequent functioning of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK). The chapter argues that one reason why Korea created and consolidated the NHRCK was to realize its desired identity as a seonjinguk (advanced country). Over time, with changes in political administrations, the definition of a seonjinguk transformed alongside human rights discourses, with implications for the NHRCK’s functioning as a channel for rights-claiming. By tracing the rise and subsequent weakening of the NHRCK from 2001 to 2012, this chapter demonstrates that national interest considerations shape state decisions about whether to comply with or disregard global human rights norms embodied in national human rights institutions like the NHRCK. It also illustrates the interplay between international and domestic human rights discourses.