The article examines the recent NGO campaigns for an EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The analysis of the narratives used shows that the campaigns portray European corporations as perpetrators, people in producing countries as mere victims, and the NGOs as heroic liberators. NGOs reproduce postcolonial trajectories by advocating a supply chain law in the Global North as the central solution to problems in the Global South. While rescue politics is thus the defining feature of NGO campaigns, there is no evidence of the strategic use of pseudo-causal narratives that are empirically inaccurate.

Prof. Partzsch had already presented a first version of the manuscript at the 2023 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference in Prague.