While focusing on corporate decision-makers, the literature on corporate misconduct has generally lost sight of how the victims of abuses influence the outcomes of organizational misconduct. In this paper, we fill this gap by focusing on a specific type of victims, namely human rights or environmental defenders (i.e., defenders), who are individuals who actively protest against corporate misconduct and decisions affecting their communities’ rights. We suggest that defenders’ behavior might elicit noticeable reactions in corporate CEOs, who are both morally and legally accountable for violations against them and their communities. In this paper we explore the configurations of characteristics concerning the defenders themselves and the CEOs of the involved companies to examine for the first time what kind of configurations are most likely associated with defenders’ violation of physical integrity – one of the most egregious forms of human rights violations. We also consider the institutional quality of the country where the violations are perpetrated. By way of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) on a sample of 782 violations against human rights defenders, we identified four distinctive configurations: (1) Environmental defender as an easy target; (2) Environmental defender against profit-minded CEO; (3) Workers’ defender against profit-minded CEO; (4) Workers’ defender against seasoned CEO.
