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Being an introductory essay to a book which is the final publication of the EU-funded project “Victims and Corporations. Implementation of Directive 2012/29/EU for victims of corporate crimes and corporate violence” (www.victimsandcorporations.eu), it is an overview of the main topics therein. Within the scope of the Directive and its definition of ‘victim’, though, there is a relevant group of victims who have not yet received enough consideration, and whose access to justice may be at stake. It is the victims of corporate crimes, and particularly of corporate violence, meaning those criminal offences committed by corporations in the course of their legitimate activities, which result in harms to natural persons’ health, integrity, or life. Within the vast area of corporate crime, the project and this publication focus on three main strands of victimisation: environmental crime, food safety violations and offences in the pharmaceutical industry. Within such framework, the essay especially focuses on one crucial feature in the relationship between corporations and victims of corporate violence, namely the epistemic disproportion disadvantaging the formers and preventing their ability to protect themselves. Secrecy, which is typical feature of organizations makes this disproportion still worse and acts also as a shield for corporate executives from the real consequences of their decisions. Victim protection and corporate violence prevention thus require legal and cultural tools addressing such epistemic disadvantage and arousing, among corporate managers, the due ‘salience’ of actual or potential victims needs. Just the recourse to restorative justice may be included among the ways to favour such a paradigm shift.

Being an introductory essay to a book which is the final publication of the EU-funded project “Victims and Corporations. Implementation of Directive 2012/29/EU for victims of corporate crimes and corporate violence” (www.victimsandcorporations.eu), it is an overview of the main topics therein. Within the scope of the Directive and its definition of ‘victim’, though, there is a relevant group of victims who have not yet received enough consideration, and whose access to justice may be at stake. It is the victims of corporate crimes, and particularly of corporate violence, meaning those criminal offences committed by corporations in the course of their legitimate activities, which result in harms to natural persons’ health, integrity, or life. Within the vast area of corporate crime, the project and this publication focus on three main strands of victimisation: environmental crime, food safety violations and offences in the pharmaceutical industry. Within such framework, the essay especially focuses on one crucial feature in the relationship between corporations and victims of corporate violence, namely the epistemic disproportion disadvantaging the formers and preventing their ability to protect themselves. Secrecy, which is typical feature of organizations makes this disproportion still worse and acts also as a shield for corporate executives from the real consequences of their decisions. Victim protection and corporate violence prevention thus require legal and cultural tools addressing such epistemic disadvantage and arousing, among corporate managers, the due ‘salience’ of actual or potential victims needs. Just the recourse to restorative justice may be included among the ways to favour such a paradigm shift.

Through the obscure, tragic and irredeemable clouds of war, sometimes filters out some gleam of truth and dignity: 'thoughtful truces', acts of recognition of the 'face of the other', right actions, beyond the simple obedience to the order received. It is the literary narrative that knows how to distinguish, in the 'steel storms' of mass conflict and industrial carnage, no less than in everyday lives, what is 'spiritually typical', the 'spectral dimension' ', as the Austrian writer Robert Musil would have said, in which the human mettle can show itself. One may perhaps think that this magic of disarmament, which is renewed every time in the great narratives, is destined to enlighten - yesterday, today and always - those who, by profession and by simple belonging to the human race, desire and must confront themselves. with the 'question of justice'. To thicken even more this great issue, guiding it to possible answers, it is really the look of literature that has been able to penetrate the extreme destruction of the war, of a war that has been called ‘Great’. The book - a collection of essays written by lawyers, historians, political scientists, literary and film critics, philosophers and writers - is a painful and participatory search for 'right words', inspired by the stories of those who have crossed the abysses of the conflict. A war that can be named Great also because it really never ended as it epitomized and anticipated many of the horrors of our recent past and of a present that still is not able to free itself from the ghost of “Polemos”, from the hostility towards all those who are or may be deemed as ‘other’, namely as people somewhat looked and treated as adversaries