Based on long-term ethnographic research, including documentary research, qualitative interviews and observations made at a Portuguese shelter for “sex trafficked women,” this paper explores the counter-trafficking apparatus questioning who benefits from it. The discussion explores the contrasts between an institutional commitment to constructing this apparatus and the actuality of procedural efforts purporting to support “trafficking victims.” The author argues that the higher goal of building a countertrafficking apparatus — in itself a political objective — limits the rights of “victims,” making processes that claim to be part of their protection de facto neo-liberal anti-political exercises in reenforcing bureaucratic state power.
Written by Jordan Greenbaum, Hanni Stoklosa, and Laura Murphy. The global pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus exacerbates major risk factors for global human trafficking. Social isolation of families and severe economic dis...Read More
Human trafficking has long-lasting implications for the well-being of trafficked people, families, and affected communities. Prevention and intervention efforts, however, have been stymied by a lack of information on the scale and scope of the probl...Read More
The thousands of migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia, and Laos who cross the border into Thailand each year trade near-certain poverty at home for the possibility of relative prosperity abroad. While most of these bids for a better life do not end ...Read More
The Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) has created an ex- pansive system of unprecedented state control over the 13 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other minoritized eth- nic and religious groups of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autono- mous Region (Uyghur...Read More
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