This book explores the international politics behind the identification of human trafficking as a major global problem. Since 2000, tackling human trafficking has spawned new legal, security and political architecture. This book is grounded in the premise that the intense response to this issue is at odds with the shaky statistics and contentious definitions underpinning it. Given the disparity between architecture and evidence, Wylie asks why human trafficking has become widely understood as a threat to personal and state security in today's world. Relying on the idea of 'norm lifecycle' from constructivist International Relations, this volume traces the rise and impact of anti-trafficking activism. Global common knowledge about trafficking is now established, but at a cost. Taking issue with the predominant framing of trafficking as sexual exploitation, this book focuses on how contemporary globalization causes labour exploitation, while the concept of trafficking legitimates states' securitized responses to migration.

Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics. Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement's feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its universal goal and gradually gave way to nationalist concerns over "undesirable" migrants and state control over women themselves. Addressing an issue that is still of great concern today, this book sheds light on the ability of international non-governmental organizations to challenge state power, the motivations for state involvement in humanitarian issues pertaining to women, and the importance of gender and sexuality to state officials engaged in nation building.

Although human trafficking has a long and ignoble history, it is only recently that trafficking has become a major political issue for states and the international community and the subject of detailed international rules. Anne T. Gallagher calls on her direct experience working within the United Nations to chart the development of new international laws on this issue. She links these rules to the international law of state responsibility as well as key norms of international human rights law, transnational criminal law, refugee law and international criminal law, in the process identifying and explaining the major legal obligations of states with respect to preventing trafficking, protecting and supporting victims, and prosecuting perpetrators. This book is a groundbreaking work: a unique and valuable resource for policymakers, advocates, practitioners and scholars working in this controversial and important field.

Human trafficking has moved from relative obscurity to a major area of research, policy and teaching over the past ten years. Research has sprung from criminology, public policy, women’s and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and law, but has been somewhat hindered by the failure of scholars to engage beyond their own disciplines and favoured methodologies. Recent research has begun to improve efforts to understand the causes of the problem, the experiences of victims, policy efforts, and their consequences in specific cultural and historical contexts. Global Human Trafficking: Critical issues and contexts foregrounds recent empirical work on human trafficking from an interdisciplinary, critical perspective. The collection includes classroom-friendly features, such as introductory chapters that provide essential background for understanding the trafficking literature, textboxes explaining key concepts, discussion questions for each chapter, and lists of additional resources, including films, websites, and additional readings for each chapter. The authors include both eminent and emerging scholars from around the world, drawn from law, anthropology, criminology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science and the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas, as well as for scholars interested in trafficking.

This book provides the first overarching, empirically grounded, critical analysis of child trafficking as an idea, ordering principle, and artefact of politics. It examines (once) hegemonic anti-child trafficking discourse, policy and practice, and does so by placing secondary literature from around the world in conversation the author’s paradigmatic case study of the situation in southern Benin. It deconstructs the child trafficking paradigm, contrasts it with ‘real’ histories of child and youth labour and mobility, and seeks to explain it by going ‘inside’ the anti-trafficking field. In doing so, Howard tells a gripping story of ideology at work.

Human trafficking is a criminal and security concern: it can fuel conflict, drive displacement, and undercut the ability of international institutions to promote peace and stability. The United States and its allies should take steps to reduce human trafficking in conflict and terrorism-affected contexts while promoting broader peace and stability.

Brokered Subjects digs deep into the accepted narratives of sex trafficking to reveal the troubling assumptions that have shaped both right- and left-wing agendas around sexual violence. Drawing on years of in-depth fieldwork, Elizabeth Bernstein sheds light not only on trafficking but also on the broader structures that meld the ostensible pursuit of liberation with contemporary techniques of power. Rather than any meaningful commitment to the safety of sex workers, Bernstein argues, what lies behind our current vision of trafficking victims is a transnational mix of putatively humanitarian militaristic interventions, feel-good capitalism, and what she terms carceral feminism: a feminism compatible with police batons.