Justice and accountability for business involvement in international crimes: Legal struggles and strategies in the Lundin case

The overall aim of the project is to understand the strategies of, and struggles between, legal actors taking part in the criminal trial of Lundin Energy.

In November 2021, the Swedish Prosecutor brought criminal charges against Lundin Energy and two corporate directors for complicity in war crimes in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.?The case is expected to be the longest trial in Swedish history and is of international significance legally and politically.

Criminal trials commonly deal with a contested reality, where the involved parties utilise various strategic practices, based on the capital they possess, to sustain a particular definition of the situation.

In this interdisciplinary project, we will examine the trial on two levels of analysis: the level of legal reasoning, focusing on the intersection of domestic and international law in cases of international crimes, and the interactional level, focusing on the interactions between legal actors in the Lundin trial.

The project will utilise several types of method and empirical material: firstly, legal sources and official documentation related to the court case; secondly, observations made during the trial – so-called court ethnography; and thirdly, interviews with the different parties during and after the trial.

The analysis will take as point of departure Bourdieu’s (1987, 1993) concept of ‘fields’ as the site of struggles between social agents that possess various forms of capital (economic, legal, symbolic etc.).