Via Flickr user Vit Hassan

FOR INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER Georgette Gagnon, October 30, 2002 is a day she won’t soon forget. She was living in Sarajevo and working with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “I remember opening an email from the Sudan Inter-Agency Reference Group and learning that Talisman had finally sold its stake in Sudan,” she recalls. Gagnon was all too familiar with the human rights atrocities taking place in Sudan’s oil region having participated in three missions—including the Canadian government’s Harker mission—to the wartorn African nation.

Over the phone from her Toronto home, as she packed for a move to Washington, D.C. and a new job with Human Rights Watch, Gagnon admits, “my initial surge of jubilation quickly faded to feelings of profound sadness for the Sudanese people. They remain the human cost of oil.” But Gagnon takes solace in knowing that the lessons of Talisman’s controversial four years in Sudan have not gone unnoticed. “I recently heard that several Canadian corporations passed up lucrative contracts in Iraq for fear of becoming ‘Talismanized.’ This is a somewhat positive sign that some Canadian companies are looking at both the reputational and human rights implications of doing business in a conflict zone,” she says.

It likely won’t make it into the next edition of the Oxford but the term ‘Talismanized’ has definitely found its way into CSR lexicon. It serves as savvy shorthand to describe the public and market backlash against corporations operating in conflict zones. Such linguistic notoriety surely brings little comfort to its namesake, Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc., one of Canada’s second largest independent oil and gas companies.

Talisman is credited by some—and cursed by others—for leveraging its superior technical expertise and extensive financial muscle to open up Sudan’s domestic oil industry. Talisman entered Sudan as the operational partner of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC). Rounding out Talisman’s 25 percent share were three state-owned companies from China (40 percent), Malaysia (30 percent), and Sudan (5 percent). In addition to their oil concessions, GNPOC built a 1,540 kilometre pipeline to the Red Sea, making the export of Sudanese crude economically viable for the first time.