Injection: Modern Slavery and Political Strategy

Abstract

The political fortunes of recent campaigns targeting “modern slavery” and human trafficking have been shaped by strategic calculations and institutional interests. Different actors have been attracted to the category of modern slavery for different reasons. For civil society campaigners, modern slavery offers a way of harnessing the iconography of transatlantic enslavement to draw attention to “exceptional” cases of exploitation. Conversations about modern slavery can also be strategically useful for many governments and corporations, since they can help to deflect or displace more challenging questions about the systemic abuse and exploitation of precarious migrants and workers. These calculations play a key behind the scenes role when it comes to determining whether different cases of exploitation and coercion are classified as the same as, similar to, or separate from historical systems of enslavement.

Introduction

The last three decades have been marked by a major global investment in the concept of “modern slavery,” which is also closely associated with the related categories of human trafficking and forced labor. These categories mean different things from a legal standpoint, yet the finer distinctions between them routinely get lost, with modern slavery, human trafficking, and forced labor frequently being portrayed as essentially interchangeable and equivalent. Most references to modern slavery are not based on careful historical analysis or expert legal knowledge, but instead draw upon the historical and symbolic notoriety of slavery as an exceptional category. Thanks in large part to the numerous atrocities that defined centuries of transatlantic enslavement, slavery is commonly recognized as epitomizing the absolute “worst of the worst” as far exploitation, vulnerability, and coercion are concerned. When specific practices are described as forms of slavery, or as slavery by another name, this frequently involves politically motivated efforts to strategically harness the historical notoriety of transatlantic slavery to highlight exceptional abuses. Framed in these terms, modern slavery can be best understood as an evocative concept, rather than a clearly defined analytical or legal category, with “slavery” chiefly serving as a symbolic marker, or floating signifier.

This chapter approaches modern slavery from a political and strategic standpoint. This means focusing upon how and why the category of slavery has been applied to different practices and problems, and with the political consequences that have followed from this association. As we shall see, contemporary efforts to establish a dividing line between slave and non-slave, or “free” and “unfree,” will always be an inherently political exercise. Some activists have embraced the language of modern slavery because they believe that classifying specific practices as forms of slavery will help to promote corrective action to combat specific cases of exploitation and abuse. There is an underlying strategic calculation at work here: labeling practices as slavery is assumed to generate levels of attention and investment that would not otherwise be available. However, this calculation is less straight-forward than it might initially appear. Claims about slavery are likely to be treated with suspicion if/when they are applied too broadly and indiscriminately, and conversations about “modern slavery” may also end up diluting or sidelining histories of enslavement and their legacies.¹ As Adelle Blackett observes, “slavery is not a metaphor,” yet it frequently gets treated as such.² At the other end of the equation, there are also numerous occasions where political and economic elites also try their best to restrict the definition of slavery, since they have direct interests in labor systems and other practices which they would prefer not to be associated or equated with slavery. Corporations and employers who mistreat and abuse their workers will still insist that their workers are “free,” and therefore do not require better treatment.

The key point at issue here is the different ways in which claims about modern slavery can end up tacitly legitimating, or at least de-prioritizing, other kinds of practices. Whenever slavery is the yardstick against which other practices are measured then exploitative practices which appear as “bad but not all that bad” can end up appearing unremarkable, or even desirable. Free labor always sounds preferable to slave labor. Who wouldn’t want to be free if slavery was the alternative? However, these frequently abstract alternatives are not always particularly useful in analytical or political terms. The highly sanitized image of “free” labor which is typically found in economic textbooks frequently bears little or no relation to the forms of precarity, vulnerability, exploitation, and abuse endured by huge numbers of people. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there were around 24.5 million people subject to forced labor globally in 2016. This estimate is not especially reliable, but it can nonetheless be employed as a rough benchmark. The ILO also recently calculated that over 60 percent of the world’s employed population—or two billion people—were engaged within the informal economy.³ Most labor which gets formally classified as “free” is also routinely defined by exploitation and abuse, inadequate and irregular wages, stigmatization and discrimination, unhealthy and dangerous conditions, and sexual harassment and assault. The Covid-19 pandemic has only further exacerbated this situation.

The first half of this chapter focuses upon the politics of classification and comparison. It explores the ways in which different contemporary practices have been benchmarked against the iconography of transatlantic enslavement. It also identifies two key themes—consent and treatment—which are argued to play a central role in shaping efforts to classify and rank their relative severity. The second section connects this analysis to the political dynamics behind the emergence of the category of modern slavery and the challenges and complications associated with recent policy interventions. The central argument of this section is that targeting specific cases of “exceptional” abuse—modern slavery—will always be more politically appealing than confronting the global systems and interests that currently benefit from highly exploitative forms of “free” labor.

The Politics of Classification and Comparison

The ambiguity which now surrounds slavery can be traced to the effects of its legal abolition.⁴ Until relatively recently, slavery was a legally recognized category that was officially regulated and defended by governments and religious authorities. While different historical slave systems had different features, they were nonetheless broadly defined by a series of publicly recognized rules which governed the status of the enslaved in a variety of distinctive ways. People who were enslaved were in little doubt as to their status, since there were elaborate systems in place that carefully codified how they could be sold, inherited, or manumitted, along with other extensive powers exercised by their enslaver. These systems were in turn defended by layers of violence and surveillance, which were designed to collectively keep the enslaved in their “rightful” place, and to prevent and punish resistance. Our world today is now organized on very different terms thanks to the passage of numerous laws outlawing slavery throughout the globe. There remains no shortage of examples of exploitation, vulnerability, and coercion, but the elaborate systems that regulated and defended slavery as a distinct status and institution have been almost entirely dismantled, although their systemic legacies persist through systems of racism, discrimination, and privilege.

This creates all kinds of challenges when it comes to applying the category of slavery to contemporary practices. Most conversations about modern slavery chiefly focus upon individual cases, rather than institutional characteristics. This means that the category of “slave” is typically applied to a subcategory of individual cases within a much larger population (although there are some exceptions to this pattern, such as entire populations who are collectively and uniformly subject to forced labor, such as prisoners in North Korean gulags). The logic here is hard to fault. Not all migrants, war captives, supply chain workers, or other vulnerable populations are going to have the same kinds of experiences, so if we want slavery to be a meaningful category then there is a strong case to be made for limiting its scope to exceptional cases of exploitation and abuse. However, this also means concentrating upon differences in degree, rather than differences in kind. Numerous workers will experience exploitation and abuse, but only a minority of workers are likely to experience levels of abuse which are determined to rise to the threshold associated with slavery.

These kinds of variations in experience are commonly described in terms of a scale or spectrum.⁵ Some practices are said to belong at the pinnacle of the scale, and therefore merit being classified in exceptional terms: modern slavery. Others are instead located further down. In this context, efforts to determine where the category of slavery should be applied typically focus upon two core themes: (1) the absence of meaningful consent combined with (2) high levels of physical and psychological ill-treatment, premature death, unconstrained authority, and hard and unhealthy labor for little or no reward. Consent is not always straightforward, since there are times when it can be difficult to disentangle individual choices from structural constraints. Conversations about modern slavery usually avoid these more ambiguous cases and instead prioritize cases which feature more clear-cut examples; captivity, overt coercion, and/or children. Much the same applies when it comes to treatment, with an emphasis on cases of acute forms of abuse, “disposable people”⁶ and/or “control tantamount to possession.”⁷ Ideas about “innocence” also play a further role. Assessments of relative severity tend to be mediated by notions of vulnerability and culpability, with particular concern being directed toward “women and children” who are not regarded as responsible for their fate.⁸

These twin themes of consent and treatment are strongly linked to inherited images of transatlantic enslavement, which tend to function as the primary (if not always acknowledged) benchmark for comparison when it comes to evaluating the status and severity of different forms of exploitation. As scholars such as Igor Kopytoff have argued, comparisons between transatlantic enslavement and other forms of exploitation tend to be structured around subjective appraisals of “good” or “bad” treatment, which in turn function as imperfect benchmarks for assessing relative severity.⁹ Within this context, transatlantic enslavement is commonly defined in terms of a series of powerful images, spectacles, and testimonials of extraordinary suffering and abuse: chains, ships, whips, auctions, and death. This iconography has a complex and contested history, and it tends to prioritize bodily suffering over the less visible yet still massively harmful psychological and social effects of enslavement. Slavery was not only a system of extreme violence and terror. It was also a system of extreme subordination and discrimination that placed extreme restrictions on movement, community, work, and family. It would still have been monstrous without extreme bodily suffering. However, these aspects routinely get lost when it comes to comparative evaluation. Treatment is chiefly understood in terms of acute levels of physical abuse and material deprivation.

This politics of classification and comparison is structured in hierarchical terms. Modern comparisons between transatlantic enslavement and various forms of contemporary exploitation typically locate transatlantic enslavement at an exceptional position at the apex of a hierarchical scale, and then further argue that there are specific cases of exploitation, vulnerability, and coercion that should be classified as the substantive equivalent of transatlantic enslavement, and thus warrant being classified as examples of modern slavery. This can be visually represented in terms of a triangle (Fig. 38.1), with transatlantic enslavement occupying a position at the uppermost point, and other categories or “levels” of exploitation and vulnerability being located further down the scale based on comparative appraisals of their “lesser” severity. Many historical practices could also potentially be analyzed in similar terms, but for this chapter the main concern is how the contemporary practices are benchmarked against inherited images of transatlantic enslavement.

Fig. 38.1

Benchmarking contemporary practices against transatlantic enslavement

This contemporary focus is reflected in the other categories which have been included here: “lesser” forms of servitude, exploitative “free” labor, and “normal” labor and living conditions. None of these categories are straightforward or clear-cut. Firstly, we have servitude, which is an umbrella term that is usually understood to include slavery as a subcategory, with other forms of servitude including serfdom, pawnship, and indentured, bonded, and forced labor. The language of “lesser” servitudes, which comes from the work of international lawyer Jean Allain, refers to practices that are said to fall just short of slavery, but which nonetheless said to share core features in common.¹⁰ The most important touchstone here is the 1956 United Nations Supplementary Slavery Convention, which expanded the scope of international obligations against slavery by including additional provisions specifically targeting “practices and institutions similar to slavery.”

Next comes highly exploitative “free” labor. Whenever free labor gets compared to slavery—or “unfree” labor more broadly—the terms of the comparison almost invariably end up casting free labor in a highly favorable light. This is politically significant, because it portrays “free” labor as a condition which is positive or desirable, and in turn suggests that people should be thankful to be “free.” Although freedom is commonly associated with many positive virtues, the accompanying language of “choice” or “consent” can sometimes end up obscuring more than it reveals.¹¹ In theory, free labor involves workers negotiating a deal with an employer regarding their service. If the employer uses direct coercion to compel them to start work, or to continue to work, then their labor is said to be “unfree.” However, there will be countless examples where desperate workers lack viable alternatives, and therefore “freely” consent to highly exploitative conditions.

There are currently hundreds of millions of “free” laborers across the globe who endure terrible and irregular wages, unsafe and unhealthy workspaces and homes, sexual harassment and assault, and bullying and abuse. They may well be formally free to leave, in the sense that they retain the capacity to seek out other forms of work, but their capacity to exercise any kind of individual “choice” nonetheless remains severely constrained by their precarious status and a shortage of viable alternatives. It is also worth noting here that the triangle can be potentially misleading, since highly exploitative “free” labor is actually much more common than the “normal” labor and living conditions located at the bottom end of the scale. In this context, “normal” can be best understood as a marker for the highly privileged wages and living conditions enjoyed by most people in wealthy developed countries. Normal does not mean widespread, but instead refers to privileged circumstances that appear as “normal” from the vantage point of activists and organizations in the Global North, who have the largest voice within modern slavery conversations.

Some of the issues at stake here can be usefully illustrated by thinking about labor practices in global supply chains. As is well known, the last three decades have seen numerous international corporations engage in a “race to the bottom,” with most aspects of production processes and supply chains being relocated to countries in the Global South with lower wages, less regulation, and fewer workplace protections. For corporate executives, the main goal of the global supply chain is to maximize corporate profits while minimizing their political and legal liability by subcontracting and outsourcing. Major corporations exercise their market power to drive down costs per unit, since their suppliers in the Global South have limited capacity to bargain for better returns or less demanding production cycles.¹² This combination of low prices and high expectations means that companies down the chain are under sustained pressure to minimize wages and working conditions. Contracts get subcontracted and then subcontracted again, creating multiple layers between the corporation and the worker produces the goods required.

How should workers toward the bottom of these global supply chains be classified? Do they belong in the “free” labor category, or do their circumstances sometimes rise to the threshold of slave or unfree labor? When faced with the question of classification should we focus upon similarities with slavery (i.e., exceptionally bad treatment), and thereby advance an argument that exploitative working conditions endured at the bottom of the chain should be classified as the same as, or as bad as, slavery. Should we alternatively concentrate upon differences, and thereby advance a counterargument that supply chain workers cannot be equated or associated with slavery, and therefore should be positioned at a lower point on the scale? How specific practices get classified is rarely neutral or disinterested, but instead gets influenced by competing agendas and interests. It should come as no surprise that corporations and supply chain subcontractors favor the second approach, since no modern company wants to be known for sanctioning or practicing slavery.

Questions of classification usually involve both de jure (in law or policy) and de facto (in practice or substance) considerations. Corporations and governments who insist that their conduct should not be compared to slavery usually emphasize de jure arguments which concentrate upon the design of law and policy, where they can argue that official regulations that have been designed very differently to legal slavery. By contrast, activists who seek to establish connections with slavery usually concentrate upon de jure arguments which emphasize similarities in lived experience, where it is maintained that regulations are frequently ignored and/or selectively enforced, and that any credible classification should therefore be based upon what actually happens in practice.

These dynamics can be found in many contexts. Another notable example is the legal arrangements which typically govern migrant workers who travel internationally to work on constructions project or in private households. These workers are regulated by employment contracts and visa arrangements which are laid out in laws and policies, but they also continue to be subjected to exploitation and abuse. Various historical parallels can be drawn here. When the transatlantic slave trade was legally abolished, the British, French, and Portuguese turned to indentured labor schemes, which saw millions of workers from India and elsewhere sign contracts that operated in ways which resembled slave trading. How much weight should we assign to contracts and consent? How important are the lived experiences of workers? How should we respond when some workers are treated in one way while others have different experiences?

There are an estimated 23 million migrant workers in the Middle East, and many millions in other parts of the world. They are not always treated the same, yet the systems under which they labor have been designed to leave them in vulnerable situations. Migrant workers usually need work visas in to travel, and these visas usually come with numerous restrictions, making it very difficult for workers to change employers while also leaving them vulnerable to threats of deportation. This does not mean, however, that these workers should be reduced to the status of passive victims of arbitrary power. In her recent work on migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates Rhacel Parreñas cautions against an “absolutist perspective.” She carefully documents the effects of “legal infantilization,” but also argues that domestic workers are more likely to “encounter considerate employers than sadistic ones,” and that their experiences are “morally mediated.”¹³ Like all forms of labor, domestic work continues to be highly gendered.¹⁴

Two main themes can be extracted from this analysis. Firstly, it should be evident that there will always be competing positions regarding how specific practices should be classified, and the terms on which they should be compared with other practices. We should not expect to reach a lasting consensus when it comes to whether any number of exploitative practices currently found in our world today should be classified as the same as, similar to, or entirely separate from slavery, and therefore deserve to be equated with or distanced from transatlantic enslavement. Laws and regulations can sometimes help to clarify the terms of this debate, but they are unlikely to provide a definitive resolution, since they will invariably be further disagreements regarding how they should be applied in practice and/or whether they actually correspond to lived experiences. Secondly, there will always be any number of practices which will fall short of an underlying “worst of the worst” threshold. Does focusing upon exceptional cases run the risk of normalizing—or minimizing—other forms of everyday exploitation? Millions of workers are subject to highly exploited “free” labor. Should the main priority be all vulnerable workers or only workers abused to an exceptional degree? As Janie Chuang has argued, the parameters of slavery and trafficking have been marked by “exploitation creep,” where they are stretched beyond their legal meanings for activist purposes.¹⁵ Despite this expansion, the vast majority of cases of exploitation, vulnerability, and abuse still fall outside the remit of campaigns focusing on modern slavery. This is crucial to their political appeal.

Modern Slavery and the Politics of Exception

The last three decades have been marked by increasing awareness and investment regarding the global challenges associated with severe labor exploitation and other related abuses. These abuses have been classified and analyzed using a range of overlapping categories, with some of the most popular of these categories being forced labor, human trafficking, the worst forms of child labor, and modern slavery. None of the practices associated with these categories are new. They all have complex historical roots, yet they are now being talked about in distinctive ways, with the link with slavery playing a major role when it comes to generating new forms of attention and investment.

Numerous campaigns and policies have been introduced as part of global efforts to combat modern slavery and human trafficking. In 2018, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that 168 states (around 93 percent of 181 states in their database) “have legislation in place that criminalizes trafficking in persons,”¹⁶ marking a remarkable jump from a reported 33 states in 2003.¹⁷ This proliferation of new legislation forms part of substantial investment in criminal justice mechanisms. Common measures include the introduction of new criminal offenses, enhanced penalties for offenders, new cooperation agreements, specialized taskforces and bureaucratic processes, and additional measures for victim protection and repatriation. Thanks to these and other related reforms, there is now an increasingly dense global network of legal standards, specialized agencies, and bureaucratic procedures which are formally structured around categories such as modern slavery, human trafficking, and forced labor.

These official reforms have both built upon and been further reinforced by a series of new international instruments from the late 1990s that have been negotiated and ratified by numerous states. Firstly, we have the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which paved the way for a qualified capacity to charge individuals with the crime of enslavement, which was recently applied to the conviction of Dominic Ongwen (2021), from the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. The crime of enslavement is defined in terms of “any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons,” and also includes provisions pertaining to “Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.”¹⁸ This definition of enslavement found in the Rome Statute is drawn from the earlier 1926 Slavery Convention, which was relatively moribund during the later twentieth century, but which has recently resurfaced as a widely accepted benchmark for thinking about slavery today.

None of these recent instruments are specifically or exclusively concerned with slavery. They instead position slavery as one among a series of associated practices which are listed together (i.e., slavery and “lesser” servitudes). One key example of this pattern is the 1999 Convention Concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour. This Convention targets “all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.”¹⁹ Similarly, we also have the 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, which aims to combat “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”²⁰ Other recent instruments do not mention slavery as a specific issue, such as the 2011 Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which targets “the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor”²¹ and the 2014 Forced Labour Protocol, which speaks of “effective measures for the identification, release, protection, recovery and rehabilitation of all victims of forced or compulsory labor.”²²

These assorted instruments may look impressive on paper, but their practical impact tends to be constrained by numerous factors. Governments routinely sign up to international agreements which they then fail to implement, and the doctrine of sovereignty ensures that they typically face few sanctions for their failures. However, we also need to recognize that this is not simply a question of governments struggling to achieve virtuous goals. Many problems persist as a direct result of official policies, so there is usually much more going on than failures to prevent private criminal activity. Governments have always played a central role in creating and sustaining systems of exploitation, and this dynamic has continued to this day. Official policies in areas such as migration, gender, and employment consistently manufacture favorable conditions for exploitation. Many workers and migrants remain vulnerable because of, rather than in spite of, government policies.

As this example helps to illustrate, governments regularly say one thing and then end up doing something else entirely. During the nineteenth century, the Brazilian government passed numerous anti-slavery laws that were chiefly understood by insiders to be “só para o inglês ver,” or “just for the English to see.” The main goal of these laws was to alleviate external pressures, so they were designed to create the appearance of change while leaving the core features of established systems in place. Many new laws against slavery and trafficking follow a broadly similar pattern, with the US government playing a similar role to the British in the nineteenth century. Since 2001, the US State Department has been publishing annual Trafficking in Persons reports that assign rankings to governments across the globe—from Tier One to Tier Three—based upon often controversial assessments of their efforts to combat trafficking. Thanks to these rankings and other initiatives, governments have been under considerable pressure to signal a commitment to the cause.²³ The most common response has been to pass new laws and other criminal justice reforms, but these laws mean little in practice if they are not effectively enforced. Earlier optimism that new laws would yield major returns has increasingly eroded, since research into global prosecution rates has reported that comparatively few prosecutions have taken place.

Despite their well-documented limitations, criminal justice mechanisms continue to dominate conversations regarding ways of combating modern slavery and human trafficking. However, there have also been a growing number of voices who have questioned the wisdom of handing over primary responsibility to criminal prosecutors, police, and immigration agents. This is partly out of concerns that their activities have not always been beneficial, and partly out of a recognition that criminal justice mechanisms primarily focus upon symptoms, rather than underlying causes. How much effect can prosecutions have if the behavior which is being criminalized is a symptom of much larger structures of poverty, scarcity, vulnerability, and discrimination?

This has in turn contributed to a recent move to approach modern slavery and trafficking as human development issues, rather than criminal justice issues.²⁴ This move is still fairly new, so it is not yet entirely clear what it means in practice. However, there have been some significant initial steps. When the United Nations finalized their new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, these goals included a specific provision—target 8.7—which mandated:

immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labor in all its forms.²⁵

The SDGs expand upon the earlier Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) and comprise an extremely ambitious program of action—including 169 distinct targets—incorporating themes such as poverty, hunger, health, education, equality, decent work, and the environment. In keeping with the longer history of development schemes, the SDGs envisage improvements in one arena having flow-on effects into other areas, contributing to a better world for all.

Numerous organizations have invested in this specific provision within the SDGs. This most significant initiative to date has been Alliance 8.7, which is an international partnership coordinated by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Alliance 8.7 currently includes 26 “pathfinder” countries and 374 organizational partners (as of April 2022), incorporating international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and civil society organizations. In addition, it also includes four thematic “action groups,” which specifically focus upon supply chains, migration, rule of law and governance, and conflicts and humanitarian settings. To help launch Alliance 8.7 the ILO published new global estimates of modern slavery and child labor in 2017. According to these estimates, around 40.3 million people were subject to modern slavery, with 24.9 million being subject to forced labor and 15.4 million being subjected to forced marriage as a form of slavery. These estimates emerged from a unique collaboration between the ILO, the Walk Free Foundation (a civil society organization), and the International Organization for Migration. The slavery estimates were initially presented as a platform for measuring progress against modern slavery, but they were not adopted as a credible measure within the SDG system. Only the child labor estimates remain.

Comparable estimates have circulated since the 1990s. Some prominent examples include 27 million slaves (1999), 600,000–800,000 trafficking victims crossing international borders annually (2004), 12.3 million forced laborers (2005), 20.9 million forced laborers (2012), and 29.8 (2013), 35.8 (2014) and 45.8 (2016) million modern slaves. The last three examples on this list have all been produced by Walk Free, who have also published elaborate tables which attempt to quantify both national slave populations and government responses. While many journalists, activists, and politicians have taken these figures at face value, researchers such as Anne Gallagher have also identified serious problems with both data collection and data production.²⁶ The 2016 estimate produced by Walk Free was chiefly based on representative surveys using small samples from 25 countries, which generated 459 affirmative responses to survey questions concerned with forced marriage and forced labor (slavery is not mentioned in the survey). The primary data was then used to extrapolate estimates for another 140 countries, using complex modeling which included numerous other estimates and rankings. Once all these formulas were applied the 459 responses were transformed into a total of 45.8 million. This is a very limited methodological foundation.

Several issues can be highlighted here. Firstly, it is worth emphasizing that modern slavery, trafficking, and forced labor are frequently treated as equivalent and interchangeable, despite their different legal meanings. This has the effect of complicating already difficult questions about where slavery begins and ends. Second, these global estimates are much better at generating publicity than guiding policy. While quantitative research into specific locations and industries can generate valuable information, it is extraordinarily difficult to effectively measure a concept as challenging as slavery on a global scale. It therefore remains an open question whether the very limited data used to produce global estimates plays a useful role in targeting specific interventions in specific locations. Their most significant effect has instead been to attract media interest and public attention. For many decades now, journalists have been publishing sensational reports regarding the existence of “X” million slaves today. These reports are commonly accompanied by other pseudo-statistical claims about how there are “more slaves now than any point in history,” or how “modern slavery is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises.” The main function of these types of claims is to advance the case that modern slavery should be treated as an exceptional problem, which deserves urgent and immediate attention. They are rarely checked for accuracy.

These and other related activities have helped to propel modern slavery to the front ranks of global conversations about human rights and exploitation. In a world which has no shortage of horrific abuses, this is one topic which has attracted an unusual level of public interest and institutional investment. One of the most important effects of this elevated political profile has been the degree to which a diverse range of problems has recently been repackaged in anti-slavery or anti-trafficking terms. Activists seeking resources and recognition have learnt to speak in new concepts, and to build new alliances, since additional support can be secured by describing specific practices as slavery or trafficking. When the 2000 Trafficking Protocol was negotiated in the late 1990s the main focus was the exploitation of international migrants by organized criminals for the purposes of commercial sex. The years that have followed have been marked by the rapid expansion of introductory lists of forms of modern slavery and trafficking to include all kinds of practices.

Thanks to this ongoing proliferation, efforts to combat modern slavery and trafficking are now widely understood to include issues associated with the following themes:

• commercial sexual exploitation

• hereditary bondage and descent-based discrimination

• bonded labor (or debt bondage) and exploitation

• migration and exploitation

• child labor and exploitation

• domestic labor and exploitation

• global supply chains and exploitation

• wartime captivity and wartime abuses

• forced and early marriage

• forced labor by the state/prison labor.²⁷

This list comes with all kinds of complications and challenges—both politically and analytically—yet it nonetheless provides a representative snapshot of the diverse range of themes which have recently been included within the modern slavery agenda. When trying to make sense of this ambitious agenda, it is important to keep in mind that it only directly applies to a minority of cases within a larger population (e.g., not all marriages are forced marriages). Identifying and targeting these exceptional cases tends to be an extremely challenging exercise in logistical terms, which is further complicated by the ways in which individual circumstances frequently change over time.

Not all of these themes fit together comfortably. Activists campaigning against the abuse of migrant laborers in the United States have little to do with their counterparts seeking to combat hereditary bondage in West African countries such as Mali, Mauritania, or Niger. Uighurs subject to forced labor in Xinjiang are not directly linked to bonded laborers in Pakistan and India who make bricks. There are sometimes broad similarities in the types of abuses which take place in different contexts, but a great deal of a creative aggregation and extrapolation is still required to weave together these different issues under the global banner of combating modern slavery. There are also sharp differences at a diagnostic level. Some activists and organizations favor a highly technocratic approach, with the goal being to leverage technology, corporate support, and regulators to nudge business in better directions. Others instead primarily think in terms of covert criminal conspiracies, which increasingly means viewing the cause through a lens grounded in “pizzagate” and “Qanon.” Viewed in these terms, human trafficking and modern slavery primarily—and falsely—relate to the ritual sacrifice of trafficked children by a “deep state” cabal of politicians and celebrities. These conspiracy theorists are unlikely to embrace the efforts of the technocrats to alter business models.

This creates significant tension between political rhetoric and political practice. Some of the themes listed above have attracted a great deal of interest and investment. Others get mentioned rhetorically yet this rhetoric is only rarely translated into practice. There is one theme in particular that has attracted the most attention and investment: commercial sexual exploitation. Sex has always proved to be controversial, and this issue is no exception. The main point at issue here has not been slavery per se, but the status of commercial sex. Some activists and governments view all forms of commercial sex as inherently exploitative, and therefore advocate for policies that target the purchasers and purveyors of commercial sex. Other instead argue that sex work should be treated the same as any other kind of work, and that most abuses can be traced to the criminalization of sex work. This position was recently endorsed via a decision by Amnesty International to treat sex worker rights as human rights. Many organizations and institutions who focus upon commercial sex are relatively unconcerned about labor abuses in other contexts.

The other theme which has attracted a great deal of attention is migration, which has been primarily understood in terms of movements across international borders, rather than internal movements within individual countries. International migration has become a major focal point for political debate in many parts of the world in recent years, with populism by way of racism and nativism playing major roles in the growth of political parties and platforms. The most notorious example here is former President Donald Trump in the United States, whose signature goal was to “build a wall” with Mexico. Trump is the most notorious example of a larger trend which has seen the need to prevent slavery and trafficking being repeatedly invoked to justify policies decided on non-humanitarian grounds: “border protection” infused with xenophobia.²⁸

Instead of trying to help all migrants, governments and campaigners have once again sought to concentrate their energies upon a small number “exceptional” cases of exploitation and abuse associated with migration. In this context, modern slavery (or human trafficking) has been incorporated into an established body of refugee law, with legal protections being awarded to specific individuals who satisfy relevant legal criteria as victims of slavery. While this may sound good in theory, it has ultimately proved to be subject to all kinds of problems in practice. A small number of exceptional victims have been given limited protections while a much larger migratory population remains subject to arrest, deportation, exploitation, vulnerability, and abuse. Everything that doesn’t count as “exceptional” is tacitly regarded as “normal,” and it has become normal practice for governments to treat most international migrants—both legal and illegal—atrociously. One of the most notorious examples of this much larger dynamic is the recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, where the language of slavery and trafficking has been harnessed by governments to justify and legitimate policies designed to make life harder for African migrants seeking sanctuary. Since 2015 the European Union has spent nearly six billion US dollars trying to prevent migration from Africa. Half a billion dollars has been spent in Libya, with funds going to support a network of profit-making prisons run by private militias where abuses are endemic.²⁹

As this example helps to illustrate, efforts to combat modern slavery can sometimes look good on paper, yet then end up doing more harm than good in practice. Researchers have come to describe this disconnect between aims and outcomes in terms of “collateral damages,” which broadly refers to situations where state—and sometimes also private—interventions end up damaging marginalized and vulnerable populations that they are formally designed to help.³⁰ As Elizabeth Bernstein has argued, these interventions can be traced back to the logics of “carceral protection” and “militarized feminism,” For Bernstein, dominant strands within anti-trafficking serve to “facilitate, rather than to counter, the carcerally controlling arm of the neoliberal state.”³¹ Common examples of damage involve police abusing those they are supposed to be assisting, immigration systems mistreating migrants with impunity, and individuals who have been “rescued” being subjected to forms of incarceration, exploitation, and abuse. Many governments and activists remain reluctant to grapple with the full implications of these collateral damages. While this reluctance is understandable on one level, since no one wants to hold their hands up and acknowledge that their actions have been not beneficial, it has also made it difficult to have already challenging public conversations regarding less damaging approaches.

As we have seen, the narrow focus on “exceptional” cases has been crucial to the appeal of the modern slavery cause, but it also creates serious logistical challenges, since it can be very difficult to identify and assist a relatively small minority of “exceptional” cases among much larger populations. In these circumstances, there will always be two major paths available when it comes to reform: (1) trying to identify, isolate, and assist a small number of exceptional cases, or (2) trying to improve rights and protections for all workers and migrants. The second of these options holds out much greater prospects of lasting success in addressing both exceptional and everyday abuses, yet this would also require major improvements to migrant and worker rights which governments and corporations are not inclined to support. So they instead tend to gravitate toward politically “safe” solutions which do not impinge too deeply or directly upon their interests, and/or strategically harness the language of anti-slavery to support pre-existing goals, such as border protection.

Conclusion

Substantial political energies have been marshaled under the banner of combating modern slavery and human trafficking since the mid-1990s. These energies have translated into a series of overlapping responses, including extensive criminal justice reforms, new international instruments, awareness campaigns and training, abstract technocratic schemes, and QAnon-style conspiracy theories and moral panics. This rapid promotion to the front ranks of the human rights agenda has also created incentives for campaigners to reclassify all kinds of practices as modern slavery and trafficking, contributing to a rapidly expanding agenda. This agenda commands a great deal of rhetorical support throughout the globe, with government officials, civil society activists, religious leaders, and corporate executives of every possible background publicly declaring their shared commitment to combating modern slavery. However, these commitments tend to be unevenly and episodically translated into practice. Commercial sexual exploitation remains the main priority for many campaigners and organizations, while levels of interest and investments tend to be much weaker in many other areas. Combating modern slavery is not a cohesive and singular political cause. It can instead be best understood as a high-profile political platform which has been built by loosely aggregating a range of issues.

The question of what “counts” as slavery today will always be an inherently political exercise. There will always be different opinions regarding whether different practices should be classified as the same as, similar to, or different from transatlantic enslavement. Many of these differences of opinion can be traced to competing interests. Governments and corporations who are directly implicated in systems of exploitation routinely declare that that it would be a mistake to associate or equate their own activities with slavery. Political campaigners frequently embrace an expansive approach to classification in the hope that the language of slavery will help to mobilize additional support and recognition for their causes. These competing positions are rarely grounded in a careful reading of the history of legal enslavement, but instead usually boil down to subjective assessments of crude levels of “good” or “bad” treatment, with slavery being widely regarded as epitomizing the worst of the worst when it comes to overall levels of coercion, captivity, and exploitation. Practices which are said to fall short of this exceptional threshold can often appear as either lesser evils or positive goods thanks to this process of classification via comparison. By narrowly focusing upon “exceptional” cases recent campaigns targeting modern slavery ultimately run the risk of reinforcing—rather than politically contesting—our profoundly unjust global order.

Notes

• 1. Karen Bravo. “Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Buffalo International Law Journal 25, no. 2 (2007): 207–21, Lyndsey Beutin, Trafficking in Antiblackness Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).

• 2. Adelle Blackett, with Alice Duquesnoy, “Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: U.S. Prison Labor and Racial Subordination Through the Lens of the ILO’s Abolition of Forced Labor Convention,” U.C.L.A Law Review 67 (2021): 1504–35.

• 3. International Labour Organization, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2018), 14.

• 4. Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

• 5. Klara Skrivankova, Between Decent Work and Forced Labour: Examining the Continuum of Exploitation (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2010).

• 6. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

• 7. Jean Allain and Robin Hickey, “Property and the Definition of Slavery of Slavery,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2012): 915–38.

• 8. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1.

• 9. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Context of African Abolition,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard L. Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 488.

• 10. Jean Allain, Slavery in International Law: Of Human Exploitation and Trafficking (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

• 11. Judy Fudge, “Modern Slavery, Unfree Labour and the Labour Market: The Social Dynamics of Legal Characterization,” Social & Legal Studies 27, no. 2 (2018): 414–34.

• 12. Genevieve LeBaron, Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance Is Failing and What We Can Do About It (London: Polity, 2020).

• 13. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 23 (first quote), 150 (second quote), 47 (third quote).

• 14. Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

• 15. Janie Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law,” The American Journal of International Law 108, no. 4 (2014): 609–49.

• 16. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (Vienna: UNODC, 2018), 45.

• 17. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (Vienna: UNODC, 2016), 47–53.

• 18. The United Nations Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2001), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0018822/. Accessed 25 April 2022.

• 19. International Labour Organization, Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (1999), C182, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C182. Accessed 24 April 2022.

• 20. United Nations, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2020), https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/protocol-prevent-suppress-and-punish-trafficking-persons. Accessed 25 April 2022.

• 21. International Labour Organization, Domestic Workers Convention (2011), C189, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C189. Accessed 24 April 2022.

• 22. International Labour Organization, Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (2014), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/protocol-2014-forced-labour-convention-1930. Accessed 24 April 2022.

• 23. Sally Engle Merry, The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

• 24. Prabha Kotiswaran, “Trafficking: A Development Approach,” Current Legal Problems 72, no. 1 (2019): 375–416.

• 25. United Nations, Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015. A/RES/70/1.

• 26. Anne Gallagher, “What’s Wrong with the Global Slavery Index?,” Anti-Trafficking Review 8 (2017): 90–112.

• 27. Adapted from Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk, “Contemporary Slavery as More than Rhetorical Strategy? The Politics and Ideology of a New Political Cause,” in Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice, ed. Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), 5–35.

• 28. Julia O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (London: Palgrave, 2015), 109–32.

• 29. Ian Urbina, “The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe,” The New Yorker, 6 December 2021.

• 30. Mike Dottridge, ed., Collateral Damage. The Impact of Anti-trafficking Measures on Human Rights Around the World (Bangkok: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, 2007).

• 31. Elizabeth Bernstein, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 72.