This introductory chapter highlights the value of socio-historical approaches for understanding the multiplicity of ideas and strategies for holding economic actors responsible for human rights violations and the massive degradation of the environment. It underlines the crucial role of transnational and intersectoral civil society alliances, but also the fragmentation of the global corporate accountability movement stemming from different ideological visions about human rights and economic development and globalisation. We argue that actor-focused analyses of corporate accountability are essential to moving beyond both depoliticised and technocratic accounts of justice in the name of supposed universalised human rights and structuralist interpretations that posit the impossibility of inclusive accountability processes due to the foundational arrangements inherent to the capitalist economic system and their legal legitimation.