Since the signing of the UN Trafficking Protocol, anti-trafficking laws, policies and other initiatives have been implemented at the local, national and regional levels. These activities have received little scholarly attention. This volume aims to begin to fill this gap by documenting the micro-processes through which an anti-trafficking framework has been translated, implemented and resisted in mainland and island Southeast Asia. The detailed ethnographic accounts in this collection examine the everyday practices of the diverse range of actors involved in trafficking-like practices and in anti-trafficking initiatives. In demonstrating how the anti-trafficking framework has become influential – and even over-determining – in some border sites and yet remains mostly irrelevant in others, the chapters in this collection explore the complex connections between labour migration, migrant smuggling and human trafficking.

Trafficking in persons is a serious crime that affects the human rights, dignity and integrity of all its victims including women, men, and children in the Association of Southeast Asia Nation (ASEAN) region. ASEAN has made efforts to fight human trafficking through inter alia the establishment of regional counter-human trafficking laws and human rights bodies to establish best norms and practices for its member countries. Nevertheless, the International Labour Organization (ILO) recently declared that there are more than 11.7 million forced labor victims in the Asia-Pacific region encompassing the biggest concentration of forced labour victims in the world. This volume reviews the achievements and the deficiencies of ASEAN’s counter-human strategies at the national and regional level. It offers suggestions for the reform of ASEAN's anti-trafficking laws and for the creation of a regional anti-trafficking human rights body specialized in preventing human trafficking, promoting equal protection of all trafficking victims, and prosecuting human traffickers.

By analysing the complex issues surrounding internal and cross-border human trafficking in Asia, and asserting critical perspectives and methodologies, this book extends the range of sites for discussion and sectors in which human trafficking takes place. The book re-centres human trafficking as an area of legitimate academic inquiry in a region that is often considered as an epicentre for human trafficking: East and Southeast Asia. It thus offers an in-depth analysis and up-to-date knowledge on research methodologies and engagements, patterns and forms of human trafficking, constructively critiquing anti-trafficking campaigns and discourses, and offering examples of good practice within the region that help us move beyond the impasse that currently hampers human trafficking as a field of inquiry in the social sciences. Providing constructive avenues for human trafficking research to proceed methodologically, theoretically and ethically, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Politics, International Relations and Southeast Asian Studies.

This two-volume report synthesizes the Asian Developments Bank's extensive research on the topic of human trafficking in Asia. Undertaken to help Asian nations better understand the dynamics of trafficking and to identify the root causes of the practice, this work features analysis of regional legal frameworks, contributing factors, and vulnerabilities. A supplementary report, "Guide for Integrating Trafficking Concerns, provides a series of steps that could be employed to limit trafficking.

The book investigates how the United Nations, governments, and aid agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration. Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies, and governments have warmed to the concept of safe migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into being through policies and programs remain unexplored. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how safe migration policies and programmes unfold through aid agencies and government bodies. The book argues that safe migration is best understood as brokered safety. Although safe migration policy interventions attempt to formalize pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants’ well-being, the book shows through vivid ethnographic details how formal migration assistance in itself depends on – and produces – informal asnd mediated practices. The book offers unprecedented insights into what safe migration policies look like in practice. It is an innovate contribution to contemporary theorizing of contemporary forms of migration governance and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and human geographers working within the fields of Migration studies, Development Studies, as well as Southeast Asian and Global Studies. Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003185734