Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: International Law in the Arena – What Squid Game Teaches About Exploitation and Power

[Eirini Fasia is a lecturer at the Law Group of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford specializing in public international law, environmental law, and the law of the sea]

‘This is hell. What are the rules in hell?’ 

Jang Deok-su, Season One

Netflix’s Squid Game (2021-2025) offers more than a dystopian spectacle. It dramatizes economic desperation through a lethal contest where indebted players gamble their lives for survival. The series belongs to the ‘survival game’ genre, along with Battle Royale and the Hunger Games. Viewers of the South Korean drama are drawn into the psychology of the players, the cold logic of the organisers, and the voyeurism of wealthy sponsors. However, the overriding questions the show provokes are not just psychological but structural: who is responsible, and who has the power to stop this?

That question reverberates far beyond fiction. Squid Game can function as an allegory for the weaknesses or failures of international law to protect individuals from systemic exploitation when it is cloaked in contractual consent and transnational business structures. Just as the players are trapped in rules that appear fixed and inescapable, international law often appears constrained in its ability to provide real protection against coercion, corporate abuse, and systemic violence. Against this backdrop, international law must ask whether its existing frameworks are adequate, or whether adaptation is needed to remain relevant and effective.

This post uses Squid Game as a lens to examine three relevant international law areas: (i) forced labour, where the prohibition of slavery and trafficking often trips over economic desperation; (ii) business and human rights, where multinational corporations (MNCs) can operate beyond meaningful accountability despite decades of legal efforts; and (iii) international criminal law, where private entities escape responsibility under rules centred on States and individuals. 

The post is not a deep dive into the complexities of international law, nor an attempt to prescribe solutions. Instead, it aims to draw parallels and stimulate a discussion on how the dynamics of exploitation, power, and impunity in Squid Game echo real-world patterns.

Forced Labour: Illusory Consent and Structural Coercion

‘We are not horses, we are humans’ 

Seong Gi-hun, Season Three

Seong Gi-hun’s bold statement captures the indignity at the heart of Squid Game: players are treated not as autonomous human beings but as disposable instruments of profit and spectacle, reduced to the status of animals in a race. The starting point here is the question of consent. In Squid Game, players are told they enter voluntarily, that they may leave if the majority agrees, and that they must follow the rules once the games begin. On paper, this appears to safeguard autonomy. In reality, the players’ choices are framed by poverty, debt, unemployment and the absence of alternatives. Further, at the end of each game, participants vote whether to continue or leave. As viewers, we are stunned when the majority repeatedly votes to carry on – even after watching mass casualties unfolding. This ‘democratic’ veneer is a striking symbol of how choice can often be illusory. 

These hollow forms of consent parallel the conditions under which millions of people worldwide fall into forced labour, debt bondage, and exploitative migration schemes. The players’ troubles closely resemble debt bondage, recognized as a form of modern slavery. Individuals pledge their labour as security for a loan, only to be trapped in cycles of repayment that are mathematically impossible to satisfy. International law has long prohibited forced labour and slavery, with the 1930 ILO Forced Labour Convention and the 1957 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention marking early milestones. However, enforcement lags far behind, as systemic poverty and lack of social protections continue to create the conditions where coercion flourishes. These vulnerabilities are particularly evident in the exploitation of migrant workers, who are frequently subjected to deceptive recruitment, exorbitant fees, and confiscation of passports. The 2000 Palermo Protocol aims to address such practices, but its uneven domestic implementation leaves wide enforcement gaps. The fiction of consent – signing contracts without understanding terms, or agreeing under duress of survival – remains a recurring feature, both in Squid Games and in real global labour markets.

It is true that international human rights law recognises that structural deprivation undermines free choice. The ICESCR enshrines the rights to work (article 6), to just conditions of employment (article 7), to social security (article 9), and to an adequate standard of living (article 11). However, these guarantees are hedged by certain ‘progressive realization’ clauses, permitting States to defer fulfilment on grounds of ‘available resources.’ The gap between formal proclamation and effective protection mirrors the troubles of Squid Game participants, ie rights on paper, but no meaningful escape in practice. 

The resonance with contemporary exploitation is not hypothetical. The Reports by the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, cited above, and the ILO document widespread forced labour in global supply chains – from garment production in South Asia to fishing vessels operating on the high seas. These real-world practices confirm the show’s core truth, survival framed as choice. Indeed, the series highlights how ‘rules’ may exist but fade in practice under power asymmetries. By reducing choice to two forms of suffering – death in the Games or destitution outside – Squid Game pictures the reality of workers who ‘voluntarily’ accept abuse under structural coercion. Unless socio-economic asymmetries are addressed, the prohibition of forced labour remains little more than an empty promise much like the empty promise of choice and hope offered to the players.

Business and Human Rights: Private Power Beyond Accountability

‘Player 456. Did you have fun playing the hero?’ 

Front Man, Season Two

This taunting quote, delivered by the Front Man to the protagonist after his objections and resistance to the Games, captures the futility of resisting a system designed for exploitation. No matter how much ‘heroism’ one player might display, the structure is built to serve the interests of the powerful financiers who fund the spectacle. The same dynamic can be observed in global governance, where international law celebrates the agency of individuals and States, yet when faced with transnational corporate power, even collective resistance often fails.

In Squid Game, the company behind the Games operates as a shadowy multinational – funded by a global elite, insulated from any legal or political scrutiny. This fictional corporation could be similar to real-world MNCs whose global reach enables them to arbitrage jurisdictions, obscure accountability through complex corporate structures, and externalize human costs. And when things go sideways, or when scrutiny gets too intense, it simply reinvents itself elsewhere, as the finale disturbingly suggests with the Games resurfacing in the US.

The 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights established the ‘protect-respect-remedy’ framework, which recognizes corporate responsibility alongside State duties. However, these principles are not binding obligations. Efforts to move beyond soft law include the ongoing negotiations within the UN Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group on a Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights, and regional initiatives such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which imposes mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence across global supply chains for companies operating in the EU. 

Despite these developments, evidence of corporate complicity abounds. Supply chains relying on forced labour; extractive industries financing armed groups in conflict zones; and technology companies providing surveillance tools used for repression. The lesson from Squid Game is that exploitation is usually systemic, and not so much the work of rogue individuals. In both fiction and reality, capital allows private power to often operate above the law and beyond effective State control. International law risks becoming Gi-hun – playing the hero against impossible odds – unless it moves past aspirational standards towards binding, enforceable obligations. Otherwise, international business is not just the Front Man of the system, but its architect.

International Criminal Law: Private Atrocities

‘People do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace’ 

Jang Geum-ja, Season Three

Jang Geum-ja’s phrase captures the essence of impunity. Atrocities are committed, responsibility is deflected, and life continues for those who profit from violence. In Squid Game, the systematic killing of hundreds of participants is orchestrated not by a State but by a clandestine corporation acting for the entertainment of wealthy patrons. The Games are designed, managed, and industrialised for profit, rendering the violence not incidental but structural. If transposed into legal terms, such conduct could amount to mass murder and crimes against humanity – widespread or systematic attacks directed against civilians, prohibited under article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC.

History offers stark precedents of corporate complicity in atrocity, from the role of business in supporting apartheid in South Africa to the supply of materials for Nazi forced labour and extermination. The industrialist trials at Nuremberg made clear that economic actors were not just peripheral but could be central to the commission of international crimes. More recently, truth commissions and litigation have futher exposed how commerce and atrocity often intertwine, while it has been established that executives can be held criminally liable for the actions of their corporations. 

The contemporary landscape is similar. Private military companies such as the Wagner Group have been directly implicated in war crimes in Africa and Ukraine. In parallel, technology and defence conglomerates – from surveillance contractors to developers of autonomous weapons and algorithmic targeting tools – have faced allegations that their products facilitate large-scale civilian harm, as documented in the context of Gaza (paras 22-27).

International criminal law, however, struggles to respond effectively to these realities. The ICC’s jurisdiction extends only to natural persons (article 25, Rome Statute), leaving corporations outside its reach. Corporate officers and directors may be prosecuted as individuals, but corporate structures often create layers of deniability across parent companies, subsidiaries, and joint ventures (A/HRC/59/23, paras 8, 13). The Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories has highlighted how corporations exploit this complexity, profiting from international crimes while evading accountability. For example, she stresses how some conglomerates now wield greater economic and political power than sovereign States, benefiting as rights-holders under international economic law but without equivalent obligations in other areas (A/HRC/59/23, paras 12, 16).

The corporation behind the Games shows precisely this gap – an entity that designs and profits from systemic violence while ensuring blame is deflected onto disposable agents. To overcome such impunity, doctrinal innovation is essential. Domestically, States can pierce the corporate veil and legislate for transnational corporate liability in cases of atrocity crimes (A/HRC/59/23, para 21). Internationally, several trajectories are visible: expanding individual liability of executives under the ICC for ‘knowledge of and material contribution’ to crimes (A/HRC/59/23, para 17), developing binding treaty frameworks on business and human rights, or even establishing jurisdiction over corporations themselves through a specialised tribunal. As things stand, the world risks reproducing Jang Geum-ja’s way of thinking that those who profit from violence will continue to ‘blame others’ and live in peace, while victims remain without justice.

Epilogue

‘The world’s not going to change just because you complain’ 

Kang Sae-byeok, Season One

Kang Sae-byeok’s bleak observation encapsulates the danger of giving up in the face of systemic injustice. Squid Game presents exploitation not as an anomaly but as intentional entertainment – violence normalised, and sold for profit. What unsettles viewers is not just the brutality but the sense of complicity, precisely because that this spectacle is uncomfortably close to reality. International law, too, often seems like a passive observer, condemning abuses without altering the very structures that make them possible. Certainly, recently, we have all felt this helplessness watching atrocities and genocide unfold before our eyes. International law promises universal dignity, yet inequality, weak enforcement, and impunity endure. It is hard not to feel that the legal order, like the players in Squid Game, is trapped in a game where the rules are stacked. And unless it can find ways to break that cycle, international law risks remaining a bystander to systemic violence – complaining about injustice, but unable to change it.