Powers of Reach

Introduction

Since the 1990s scholars working in the legal geography tradition have sought to make a case for a spatialized understanding of law. They have consistently argued that there is an important, although under-explored or even unarticulated, relationship between space and law and that a distinctive spatio-legal focus can serve as a platform for innovative empirical research and a framework of analytical evaluation. Space, they have stressed, matters to law, even if the connections between both categories are not always immediately self-evident. In an early pioneering work, geographer Nicholas Blomley put forward the argument that space is not merely a passive backdrop for the workings of law. Rather, he contended, space and law are intertwined (Blomley, 1994). Blomley’s assertion essentially brought to bear the spatialized ontologies that geographers have pioneered to set the tone for academic analysis of the spatial dimensions of law and legal phenomena. The legal geography frame of reference elaborated by Blomley lent itself well to arguments concerning how space shapes or modifies the law’s effects and correspondingly how space shapes the practice of law (see Blomley and Pratt, 2001; Butler, 2009; Delaney, 2003; Delaney et al., 2001).

At the same time, the legal geography literature has explicitly sought to promote an outlook that induces a meaningful shift away from conventional and stylized vocabularies that merely perpetuate either/or characterizations of spatial–legal relationships. It has also sought to redefine the spatial and legal as realms in which new practices and agendas are generated in radically new ways. In a remarkably short space of time, commitment to a robust geographically inflected legal discourse has grown and in turn nourished sustained investigation into a range of problematics. Within the last decade alone, there has been a steady growth of scholarship by legal geographers and other socio-legal scholars examining various conceptual and analytical issues that lie at the heart of the space–law connection (e.g. Blandy and Sibley, 2010; Blomley, 2008, 2011; Blomley and Pratt, 2001; Cresswell, 2006; Martin et al., 2010; Valverde, 2009). Some strands of work done along these lines have been particularly sensitive to the spatial and temporal aspects of legal mobilization, specifically in relation to the use of legal devices to make demands of state and non-state actors in diverse arenas.

In simple analytical terms, this article continues in the tradition of work on legal mobilization by developing the argument that spatial and legal ‘reach’ is a medium for concerted, geographically expansive legal action. In so doing, the article seeks to inject the distinctively geographical register of reach into contemporary modes of socio-legal theorizing. Partly, this objective resonates with the revitalized analytical interest in things spatial and legal in this particular journal (e.g. Atkinson et al., 2010; Blandy and Sibley, 2010; Moore et al., 2011). The empirical aspect of the argument developed here derives from a study conducted in South Africa in 2009 and 2010 that explored how redress campaigning can act as a vehicle for challenging, and even reconfiguring, reconciliation-centric rationalities of nation-building that came to shape the post-apartheid socio-political landscape. The case study examined the distinctive strategic practices underpinning a social movement-driven agenda framed around redress for victims of apartheid-era human rights violations and given practical form in the legal pursuit of reparations. This redress agenda emerged in the early 2000s in the shadow of the South African reconciliation project, which was embodied by the iconic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the simplest terms, rationalities of reconciliation were deployed towards nation-building ambitions in a process of practical engagement with frames of reference involving tropes of societal healing and transformation. However, as I have argued elsewhere, in spite of the intentions that drive them, TRC-type reconciliation projects do not come off straightforwardly or uncontested. Rather, these projects run into various sorts of ‘resistance’ that creates fields of counter-practices from where repertoires of redress may emerge in unforeseen ways. In other words, the rational calculations behind these projects are often far from finalizing, but rather open up paths for oppositional projects What these oppositional projects share is a concern with overcoming what is seen to be ossified normative visions that present reconciliation as reparative and therefore an end in and of itself. In South Africa, in particular, this logic has been countered by way of claims mobilized by the victim advocacy group Khulumani Support Group (hereafter Khulumani). For the most part, Khulumani’s essential claim has turned on the reasoning that the South African reconciliation project was hampered from the outset by an overbearing ideological disposition that translated into a push from state quarters for reconciliation at the expense of redress. In short, Khulumani promoted the view that, by disregarding legitimate issues of justice in the bid to foster national reconciliation, state actors and their collaborators did little to promote more thoroughgoing reparative processes such as holding corporations accountable for their role in aiding human rights abuses.

As the TRC’s activity began to wind down in the mid-1990s Khulumani began to project ideas around redress into the public sphere, aiming for the most part to complicate cherished and taken-for-granted discourses of reconciliation. This ultimately paved the way for a campaign that took the TRC to task for spearheading a process that was supposedly predicated on an outlook that governed victims through the vocabulary of societal healing. Khulumani directed moral and political energies towards defining the reconciliation project as a technology of disempowerment, one that undermined victim interests by taking away the right to legal redress and thus potentially locking victims in a powerless state. Khulumani’s repertoire of actions in relation to its redress campaign for the most part revolved around a purposive conceptualization of justice that was structured to play out in the arena of law, propelled by the provisions of a US legal statute from 1789 – the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) (28 U.S.C. § 1350, 2006). On the face of it at least, Khulumani’s campaign came to the fore showcasing a fairly sophisticated transnational spatial and legal quality. As I will go on to show in this article, the campaign is animated by legal mobilization that is both a novel and expedient practice. Khulumani's strategy, I suggest, is broadly reflective of an awareness of the extent to which reach – in both a spatial and legal sense – provides practical tools for mobilizing discursive and practical devices at a distance in the bid to achieve a specific goal or purpose.

Given this background, my goal in this article is to pay attention to the realities of reach that the Khulumani redress campaign opened up. To set the context for the discussion, in the section that follows I explore some of the thinking that has had a direct influence upon the conceptualization of reach taken up within the article. I suggest that, despite the intellectual advances made through academic approaches that take the relationship between space and law seriously, there has been no focus as yet on accounting for legal mobilization at a distance. In spelling this out, I will strive to make the point that the wider geographically inflected socio-legal scholarship can benefit from an analytic imagination that transcends the limits of thinking that is based solely on values of proximity and presence. I further suggest that analyses that depend on the conceptual virtues of legal geography would do well to affirm the interpretative purchase of context to the mobilization of legal devices at a distance. In a nutshell, my intention in this article is to show how the ability to act at a distance through the law is indicative of the cross-cutting mix of agentive and distanciated actions that underscore the workings of reach. In the third and fourth sections, I show how Khulumani advanced a number of claims through the ATCA to challenge the official logic of reconciliation and to articulate broad aspirations for far-reaching redressive action on the part of multinational corporations with distinctive socio-economic and political histories in South Africa. Essentially, then, I argue that Khulumani’s campaign can be seen as a claims-making device that is used to act at a distance with the goal of redress in mind. To develop an understanding of what this means, I draw on the ideas of framing as it is currently being used in a specific strand of interdisciplinary literature on social movements. Finally, I conclude with a reflections homing in on the possibilities that the concept of reach opens up for further work in socio-legal studies.

Situating Reach

In his influential Rights at Work Michael McCann argued forcefully that legal mobilization – through a combination of rights claims and litigation – is an important aspect of the activity of social actors, structured for the most part by how they perceive themselves and their objectives and strategies (McCann, 1994). In this sense, law is not merely a neutral medium for making claims – about rights in this case – but rather is a configuration whose effects are inherently related to ends, means and mobilization. For my purposes in this article, I see legal mobilization as being folded up with strategic objectives of a very specific, practical sort. Specifically, legal mobilization is a practical achievement, involving for the most part a range of efforts to do things practically with and through the law. On this view, legal mobilization is structured around the arrangement and coordination of activities over specific spaces. As McCann has more recently put it, ‘How law matters depends on the complex, often changing dynamics of the context in which struggles occur’ (McCann, 2004: 519; emphasis added). There is in this idea of context the kernel of an essentially geographical conceptualization of space (see Barnett, 1999).

So, although the law may well be ‘all over’ (Sarat, 1990), mobilizing it for specific ends remains the stuff of geographical tricks. Notwithstanding law’s seeming ubiquity, its attributes and intrinsic practices have always been spatially variable. Given this reality, the maxim ‘geography matters’ (Massey, 2005) applies to the operation of law and to the kinds of demands actors can make. To return to the idea of context, the location of law not only confers access to particular kinds of legal resources, both perceived and actual; it modifies patterns of interaction. Location creates a particular context that brings together legal institutions, fora and distinctive laws, altogether structuring a distinctive field of action. For many movements and groups, the potential of law to have a wide reach can serve as a critical motivating factor, to the extent that many have sought to literally jump spatial scales in order to draw on the potentiality that is perceived to accrue to certain geographical contexts (for example, the transnational redress campaign initiated by the ‘comfort women’ movement in 2001; see Ling, 2009; Soh, 2008).

Yet, although context is a crucial dimension of legal mobilization, it is often given over to one-dimensional analyses that miss the complex spatiality at work in appropriating legal devices and strategies from a distance. Following sociologist Bruno Latour, geographer Doreen Massey has suggested that spatiality is essentially a product of activity, ‘no more than the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices’ (Massey, 2004: 8). A robust context-focused spatial sensibility in relation to legal mobilization provides the wherewithal to think about such things as distance, location and power in ways that draw attention to practices organized around the idea of reach. In terms of a socio-legal studies framework, the concept of reach is exceptional in one fundamental respect: it unsettles fixed imaginations concerning the how and where of law. To expand on this terrain of conceptualization I want to delineate some of the ways in which the spatiality of law has been approached in the legal geography literature. I pick up on what Blomley has called a ‘splice’ (Blomley, 2004: 5) and David Delaney has referred to as the ‘nomosphere’ (Delaney, 2010), arguing that it is possible to broaden the putative understandings of space–law interactions and conditions of possibility that the individual terms summon up. Splice and nomosphere are just two examples prevalent in the burgeoning field of legal geography, an interdisciplinary project bound together by a range of socio-legal theories and spatial ontologies.

Broadly, the ideas of splice and nomosphere aim to restructure the ambivalence that is said to exist in the relationship between ‘the spatial’ and ‘the legal’. They describe a category that is simultaneously spatial and legal and have a common goal of shaping the formation of sensibilities that might activate a different dimension to the study of spatio-legal behaviour. On this score, the terms splice and nomosphere underwrite an emergent objective in legal geography to transcend the limits of a simple binary divide between space and law. However, the conceptual imaginaries at the heart of both terms elide the varying roles played by proximity, reach and distance in the spatiality of law. Delaney’s work on the nomosphere, in particular, relies heavily on a model in which space is by nature territorialized. The effect of this conception of space, I contend, is a potentially limited vocabulary for conceptualizing the spatiality of action, including legal mobilization, transpiring in more or less extra-territorial ways. By ‘extra-territorial’ what I am trying to work through is the sense in which distance figures into the imperatives of geographically distinctive repertoires of action. I contend that the imaginaries captured by the vocabulary of ‘splice’ and ‘nomosphere’ can be stretched further to accommodate a differential framing of the kinds of legal possibilities that can be engendered when actors transcend the limits of their immediate spatial confines in order to embark on a course of legal action. More to the point, I want to consider here the potential for using the analytic of reach along the lines suggested by Latourian scholarship. Broadly, the analytical purchase of my argument in what follows can be situated within a body of work in human geography that is concerned with deploying reach to shine light on a range of conceptual and empirical issues (Allen, 2003, 2005, 2011; Allen and Cochrane, 2010; also, Barnett and Scott, 2007).

Using the framework of reach as an entry-point to an analysis of redress-centred legal mobilization, the task at hand is a twofold one. First, I aim to show that the space–law relationship opens up new interactive dynamics when the imaginary of distance is factored into the equation. Reach is at once geographically expansive and sensitive. Yet, while the geographical imaginary embedded within the conception of reach no doubt suggests novel ways of thinking about the demands placed upon space, we are only beginning to fully engage with the multiple openings that thinking along these lines enables. Second, I show why a course of action embarked upon at one point in space using legal devices can have effects at other points beyond it. In drawing a line of emphasis around reach, I deploy a style of critical analysis that mirrors back in a positive light the argument that power is indicative of forms of agency involving a form of actor-driven politics. To be sure, the pedigree of the conceptual argument being presented here goes back to Latourian theories of agency. In the early 1990s, the work of Bruno Latour on ‘action at a distance’ flourished and became quickly grafted onto a raft of perspectives on strategic action occurring from afar (including governmentality; Rose, 1999). In Latour’s original formulation, ‘action at a distance’ derives from ideas around distance, specifically in relation to the sorts of linkages existing between ‘here’ and the ‘far-off’. Distance, either literally or figuratively, becomes the central aspect of action, ‘allow[ing] a point to become a centre by acting at a distance on many other points’ (Latour, 1987: 222).

In short, the importance of the idea of reach is that it moves socio-legal scholarship beyond a focus on ontologized space–law relations to give sustained consideration to how action occurs at a distance. Broadly, this conception provides the grounds for underlining the extent to which action is much less dependent on circumscribed territorial sites than it is on specific devices. Or, as John Law has put it, ‘left to their own devices human actions and words do not spread very far at all’ (Law, 1994: 24; original emphasis). This point about devices, however, does not preclude the possibility that certain contexts matter greatly to the ability to act. On the contrary, the key effect of Latour’s conceptualization of action at a distance is to underscore the fact that action in one context can be influential across space, creating impacts at points that are distant from the source of the action. In this, one can perhaps see the basis for the attraction of action at a distance for Latour and other actor-network theorists, where the sense of what is near and what is far is both shaken up and put to work.

Building on Latour’s conceptual framework around action at a distance, geographer John Allen has drawn attention to the ways in which a range of actors, including non-governmental organizations and campaigning groups, deploy modalities of reach in order to make their presence felt beyond specific regions or localities or to influence events in other spatial arenas (Allen, 2011). For Allen, the expediency of the concept of reach has a lot to do with the way it keys into and productively extends registers of power (see Allen, 2011). Indeed, seen in Foucauldian terms the driving force behind reach is a strategic model of power in which actors act for a range of ends through distanciated linkages. The concept can be subsumed within a sensibility of power as ‘games of strategy’ in which actors’ interests play out ‘in a sort of open-ended strategic game’ (Foucault, 1997: 298). Although the ability to reach out may not quite be something that an actor possesses or holds per se, it can give one an advantage over the other. It follows, then, that powers of reach are enabling, rather than constraining, allowing for the combination of certain practices, events, goals or relations together with the goal of bringing off strategic objectives by transforming conditions of possibility.

Reaching Through the Law

This article does not aim to simply add to the Latourian inspired literatures on reach, but rather seeks to push their critical analytical purchase in newer directions, specifically to a terrain of social movement action where Khulumani has operated in relation to discursive registers of justice, rights, equity and so forth. Therefore in this section I want to lay the groundwork for the analysis that is to follow, which is to examine Khulumani’s strategic moves to push for a redress-centred agenda at a distance by acting through US courts, mobilizing the ATCA to engender a set of possibilities for reparations. Before then, I will briefly situate Khulumani’s emergence and the evolution of its repertoire of action. This will allow me to highlight the ways in which the organization has framed its transnational legal campaign around a discourse of redress. Established in 1995, prior to the creation of the TRC, Khulumani is said to have been ‘conceived by victims and established by victims and for victims’ (Khulumani Support Group, 1996). Its founding is widely attributed to the early efforts of Sylvia Dlomo-Jele whose activist son Sicelo Dlomo was murdered in the 1980s. At the time, the key aim of Khulumani was twofold: firstly, to facilitate the active participation of victims in the TRC process; and, secondly, to mobilize the wider public in support of victim rights as prescribed by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. Crucially, Khulumani sought to ensure that the process allowed the voice of victims to be heard – hence the Zulu name that literally translates to ‘speak out’. All through the TRC process Khulumani played a number of victim-centred roles, including assisting victims to obtain and complete application forms, taking statements, organizing meetings and liaising with TRC officials, and providing counselling services to victims during the commission’s human rights violations hearings. One of Khulumani’s criticisms of the process was that the African National Congress (ANC)-led government too quickly assumed that the TRC alone could bring closure to the past. In particular, Khulumani regarded the reconciliatory and therapeutic discourse espoused by the TRC as an obstacle on the path to redress for apartheid victims. The Khulumani model of campaigning rested on the view that it is ‘folly to think that the demand for accountability will fade with time’, with the implication being that ‘the past is not yet past’ but lives on ‘in the present’ (Khulumani Support Group, 2005).

The organization cultivated a specific form of agency by being critical of the South African reconciliation project, suggesting that the authoritative discourse of reconciliation mainly had the effect of withering critical faculties and overwhelming the capacity for reasoned debate and discussion about justice. It combined a focus on presenting reconciliation more or less as an unquestioned ideal with the argument that the urgency of nation-building was hardly sufficient grounds for transforming the normative underpinnings of accountability that define modern understandings of justice. On this score, Khulumani sought victim reparations to counter what it perceived from the outset to be an overwhelming focus on amnesty for perpetrators of apartheid-era human rights violations. From the outset, the organization indicted state authorities for failing ‘to make good on [the state’s] reparation promises or to deal comprehensively with the lifelong consequences to victims and survivors of the gross human rights abuses that resulted from their stand against the “machinery” of apartheid on an almost daily basis’ (Khulumani Support Group, 2007). Broadly, Khulumani’s rise has coincided with a broader trend of social movement politics in South Africa fashioned around the vocabularies of anti-racist, feminist, environmental, human rights and social justice activism (see Ballard et al., 2006; Barnett and Scott, 2007; Miraftab and Wills, 2005; Oldfield and Stokke, 2006). Like other organizations involved in these activist efforts, Khulumani was particularly skilful at employing creative strategies to ascribe importance to the issue of redress, placing it alongside other, longer standing mobilizations around social justice. For the most part, this led the organization to advance a narrative of redress that was pivoted by spatially stretched, distanciated legal mobilization. In this regard, rather than thinking of rights as being securable only within a localized setting, Khulumani’s strategy involved taking up more or less active postures to mobilize the ATCA in order to reach out beyond the national boundaries of South Africa. Much of the groundwork for the analysis that follows, then, links to the reality of the spatiality of law and the normative energies afforded by location-sensitive legal mobilization.

My starting premise is to underscore the reason why, like many social movement litigants before it, Khulumani mobilized the ATCA to seek redress in the form of reparations for victims of apartheid-era abuses. Given the importance of context, as I have already pointed out, there has been a concerted move by social movements to take advantage of places in which relations of law and justice are open to reflexive reconfiguration and the gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’ can be bridged. The United States, in particular, has been attractive to international litigants, including those seeking remedies for human rights violations. The ATCA, a litigation tool that has become enshrined in American legal culture since the early 1980s, invests federal courts with jurisdiction over ‘any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States’ (28 U.S.C. § 1350, 2006). To be sure, what is central to tort litigation in general is the ability of injured parties to institute a suit for the purpose of seeking corrective justice by way of monetary compensation or other means (see Engel and McCann, 2009). Under the ATCA, lawsuits may be filed in US courts for a tort committed in violation of international law, even though the event may have occurred in a different country. There is no limit to who can be sued, and this might include foreign nationals as well as American citizens. At the same time, there is no territorial limit on the cause of action (for more on the ATCA, see Aceves, 2007; Joseph, 2004: 21–63; Teitel, 2005).

The ATCA came into force as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789, but was for the most part dormant for nearly 200 years. The Judiciary Act not only established federal courts in the first place, but also prescribed their jurisdiction to include any act that violates ‘the law of nations or a treaty of the United States’ (28 U.S.C. § 1350, 2006). Since the early 1980s, specifically in rulings by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1980 in Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, the ATCA has generally become regarded as a tool for championing human rights causes (see Aceves, 2007). In effect, the Filártiga ruling more or less revitalized a little-known legal device. It paved the way for US courts to hold that rights to remedial action should not be affected by geographical location. This has led to the emergence of a distinctive trend of transnational ATCA-backed litigation, involving human rights groups and movements, directed towards atrocities committed in various locations and times by states and their agents (see Joseph, 2004; McBarnet and Schmidt, 2007; Shamir, 2004).

Like other ATCA-driven, redress-centred campaigns before it, such as that instigated by the ‘comfort women’ movement in the early 2000s (see Ling, 2009; Soh, 2008), Khulumani operated with the understanding that geographic positioning could be a tremendous advantage in influencing and shaping its field of action. By taking powerful corporations before well-respected courts in the United States, Khulumani was of the view that it could act on these economic actors in ways that would have been more or less impossible in South Africa. Simply by playing out on the stage of one of the most powerful countries of the world, the fundamental reasoning was that litigation in US courts could force erring parties to settle claims, irrespective of the outcomes of the juridical process itself. In other words, by broadening the scope of its legal action beyond South Africa, Khulumani’s strategy was indicative of awareness of the extent to which reach could potentially influence events from afar by virtue of having greater capacity to act.

Claims, Frames and Potentiality

My objective in this section is to argue that Khulumani sought to advance a number of normatively oriented legal claims in its aspirations for far-reaching redressive action, mainly in the form of reparations, on the part of multinational corporations in order to open up channels for mobilizing the ATCA. My approach to Khulumani’s claims is to regard them as worthy of investigation in themselves since they perform important discursive work. The purpose of a claim is to ‘assert the existence of some condition, define it as offensive, harmful, or otherwise undesirable, publicize these assertions, stimulate controversy and create a public or political issue over the matter’ (Spector and Kitsuse, 2001: 142). In other words, claims are implicated in action-oriented discourses and weigh heavily on mediating practices that bolster the capacity of actors to relocate claims to new contexts of reach, including other national territories. That being said, the capacity to articulate a claim, however forceful, does not necessarily translate into favourable outcomes. Therefore, claims-makers often draw on framing processes to bolster the validity or legitimacy of their claims (see Barnett and Scott, 2007; Knight and Greenberg, 2011; Snow, 2004). Broadly, framing suggests the active construction and manipulation of meaning and it emerges out of the ability of an actor to project the authority of a claim. Social movements mobilize frames for ‘the portrayal of injustice, and the definition of pathways to change’ and to persuade others of the rightness of the cause at hand (Zald, 1996: 269). Amongst other things, frames are used to express or channel attention towards a range of demands, to formulate or give texture to a grievance, or to construct a grievance using techniques such as naming, blaming and shaming (see Barnett and Scott, 2007; Bickerstaff and Agyeman, 2009; Finnegan et al., 2010; Haltom and McCann, 2009). Sometimes framing is utilized to exemplify and elaborate not only on the urgency of a particular claim but to present alternatives as being neither practically valid nor normatively justifiable.

In other words, frames are at their fundamental core devices that do things. In what follows, I want to work with the sense that legal claims are action-oriented and infused with modes of practical reasoning. I want to take this analytical line even further by suggesting that certain claims have a geographical predisposition in that they summon up or enact a distinctive spatiality. There are at least two sides to this. Firstly, certain claims enable action at a distance, both in a conceptual and actual sense. Specifically, they provide the conditions of possibility for actors to lay claim to events that may in fact be spatially and temporally distant. Secondly, as modalities of action, claims involve diverse forms of conduct, which are embedded in and depend upon a complex spatiality of practices. This has to do with the fact that claims depend simultaneously on the ability to translate discourses, say, about rights into actions, and on geography. The meanings and politics of claims cannot be dislodged from the spatial contexts that shape their meanings or the spatialized political terrains that give them form and texture. In other words, spatial factors shape the ways in which claims are construed, practised and even contested. In part, framing underscores the extent to which actors can act strategically for all sorts of ends by putting a claim to work in spatially extensive ways. Framing here, then, is a conceptualization that is congruent with the agentive model of reach presented so far in this article, which suggests that actors are able to deploy legal devices to shape conditions of possibility at a distance. As the rest of this section will show, although frames do not have a fixed spatial essence per se, their very constitution can make them modalities of reach. I focus on some of the key claims underpinning Khulumani’s legal action and how they were framed discursively and practically to enable reach through the ATCA.

On 11 November 2002, under the banner of the Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign, Khulumani commenced a legal process focusing on multinational corporations. It joined forces with the debt cancellation campaigning organization Jubilee South Africa to file a suit in the New York Eastern District Court against 23 corporations, including Barclays Bank, IBM, British Petroleum, Daimler Chrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Royal Dutch Shell (Khulumani, et al. v. Barclays National Bank, 2002). The suit was filed ‘on behalf of victims of state-sanctioned torture, murder, rape, arbitrary detention and inhumane treatment’ (Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign, 2002). As Khulumani’s national director, Marjorie Jobson stated in an interview conducted in Johannesburg in May 2009:

Our suit is not seeking redress on behalf of everyone wronged under apartheid, but focuses on the claims of a limited number of apartheid victims. On this basis, our litigation takes on from where the TRC left off. The basis of our suit is the gross violations of human rights which the TRC identified and we are targeting companies that had a part in the violations. (Interview, Johannesburg, 4 May 2009)

Given the legislative strictures that prevented organizations like Khulumani from taking the Mbeki government to task directly for the decision not to compel corporations to pay reparations, the alleged complicity of these corporations in perpetuating apartheid abuses became the rallying point of the claims mobilized in the Khulumani suit. These claims were framed around discourses of accountability in order to accuse the corporations named of ‘aiding and abetting’ the apartheid regime and thus open up channels for an ATCA-centred case. The suit essentially mobilized the argument that the corporations so named were liable for compensatory and punitive damages to victims of extrajudicial killing, torture, sexual assault, indiscriminate shooting and detention by the apartheid regime (Khulumani, et al. v. Barclays National Bank, 2002: 4). Khulumani claimed that liability for human rights violations under apartheid could be argued in terms of the third party liability precedent set by the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946. One of the outcomes of Nuremberg was that liability for aiding and abetting a criminal endeavour can be established in cases where a party participated in the system within which a crime occurred, with the knowledge of the nature of that system and the intention to advance it. Bankers deemed to have given financial support to the Nazi regime were held responsible as accomplices for crimes against humanity (see Ehrenfreund, 2007; Schapiro, 2003). On account of this, Nuremberg is generally seen as having paved the way for the concepts of complicity and liability to be enshrined in international law.

According to the Khulumani suit, UN resolutions passed against apartheid from 1950 onwards, particularly the 1960 resolution that classified apartheid as a crime against humanity, ought to underscore the undeniable fact of the defendants’ involvement with the apartheid state as a violation of international law. Furthermore, Khulumani claimed that ‘during the relevant period, global industrialists and financiers knew or should have known of the danger [of their activities] to the black South African population’, especially given that an international boycott (including embargoes on arms, oil and technology) was indicative of worldwide disapproval of the apartheid regime. According to Khulumani, the corporations named in the suit ‘acted in conscious disregard of or with deliberate indifference to these dangers by providing substantial assistance or encouragement to the apartheid regime’. It claimed that some corporations acted unscrupulously by continuing to knowingly and willingly assist the regime throughout the period of the boycott and, in certain cases, established offshore trusts to mask their transactions with it (Khulumani, et al. v. Barclays National Bank, 2002: 156). Khulumani argued that the corporations encouraged and furthered abuses that would not have happened in the same way without their participation, and claimed that business interests were ‘active participants and initiators in constructing a political and economic system which, in the end, was classified in international law as a crime against humanity’. The suit also emphasized Khulumani's claim that ‘the period of extreme repression, from 1960 onwards, was intended to save the system that protected privilege based on race, thereby continuing to guarantee business its exclusive place in the South African economy and society’(Khulumani, et al. v. Barclays National Bank, 2002: 75). On the basis of these claims, the Khulumani suit was hinged on the framing argument that the corporations violated not only customary international law but also the ATCA.

The following excerpt from a press release of the organization states underscores the basis of the suit:

The Khulumani lawsuit should be understood against the background of the South African government’s failure to make good on its reparations promises or to deal comprehensively with the lifelong consequences to victims and survivors of the gross human rights abuses that resulted from their stand against the ‘machinery’ of apartheid on an almost daily basis. It is the companies that equipped and financially supported this ‘machinery’– the apartheid government’s security apparatuses that are being sued in the Khulumani lawsuit. (Khulumani Support Group, 2007)

Conclusion

In this article I developed the argument that spatial and legal ‘reach’ is a medium for geographically expansive legal mobilization. In making this argument, I sought to inject the distinctively geographical register of reach into contemporary modes of socio-legal theorizing.I started off by giving consideration to some of the thinking which has had a direct influence upon the manner in which the relationship between ‘the spatial’ and ‘the legal’ has been taken up within the field of legal geography. I suggested that what Nicholas Blomley calls a ‘splice’ (Blomley, 2004: 5) and David Delaney refers to as the ‘nomosphere’ (Delaney, 2010) do more than tell a geographical story about how the law and legal phenomena are connected into wider spatial systems and arenas. Yet, I sought to challenge the received terms of understanding that frame the approaches of both authors to the relationship between space and law, aiming to make a case for broadening the putative understandings of the relationship between ‘the spatial’ and ‘the legal’. On these terms, I argued that the conceptual framings of splice and nomosphere elide the varying roles played by proximity and distance in interactions between space and legal practices. I proposed the conceptual analytic of reach as a useful tool for going beyond usual approaches to examining the spatiality of law, underscoring the importance of exploring legal mobilization at a distance.

I suggested that adopting a theoretical and methodological approach that understands reach to be a medium of legal mobilization, albeit done at a distance, is fruitful for extending the possibilities of legal geographic theorizing in socio-legal studies. Reach is positioned here as an object of concerted strategic action and framed as a medium for legally oriented activism that redefines the spatial scope of legal mobilization. In examining the reasoning behind Khulumani’s redress campaign, I have endeavoured not to reproduce a discourse of blame but to deepen our understanding of how actors act at a distance through legal devices. Even though I have come at the conceptualization of reach through the lens of the South African victim support organization Khulumani, my hope is for the argument developed herein to transcend the confines of the empirical case study and foster a conversation concerning how the conceptual framework of reach might enrich the field of socio-legal studies. My sense is that the mobilization of powers of reach is emblematic of a thoroughgoing shift in the way certain social movement actors seek to use the law to achieve a variety of ends. That being said, it is important to note that, regardless of the justifications, claims or moral agendas at work, there is no fixed or given transference of the intended fruits of reach-oriented legal mobilization. The issue of whether actors like Khulumani achieve their strategic objectives of obtaining redress for victims of human rights abuses through devices like the ATCA is therefore at a minimum an open question. Nevertheless, in appropriating powers of reach, the redress campaign instigated by Khulumani practically demonstrates the possibilities that can be engendered when actors overcome the limitations of geographical fixity and strive to shape conditions of possibility at points that are distant from it. This is essentially a reflection of ‘action at a distance’, stemming from initial efforts to reshape and reorder a field of action that had been hitherto defined mainly in terms of reconciliation in terms of compelling normative modalities of justice.