This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign 'Woman'. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of 'Woman' as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe.
Early debates often read globalization as a powerful tendency destined to make state borders less pertinent. Recent research has challenged this view by suggesting that globalization and (re-)bordering frequently advance hand in hand, culminating in a condition that might be described as 'gated globalism'. But somewhat neglected in this recent wave of research is the role that particular international agencies are playing in shaping the norms and forms that pertain to emergent regimes of border control -what we call the international government of borders. Focusing on the International Organization for Migration and its involvement in the promotion of what it calls better 'border management', this paper aims to partially redress this oversight. The IOM is interesting because it illustrates how the control of borders has become constituted as an object of technical expertise and intervention within programmes and schemes of international authority. Two themes are pursued. First, recent work on neoliberal governmentality is useful for illuminating the forms of power and subtle mechanisms of influence which chracterize the IOM's attempt to managerialize border policies in countries as different as Ethiopia, Serbia and Armenia. Second, the international government of borders comprises diverse and heterogeneous practices, ranging from the hosting of training seminars for local security and migration officials, to the promotion of schemes to purchase and install cutting-edge surveillance equipment. In such different ways one can observe in very material terms how the project of making borders into a problem of 'management' conflicts with a perception of borders as a site of social struggle and politics.
There is currently a large knowledge gap about intra-European labour migration. Existing scholarship focuses overwhelmingly on the movement of workers from East to West Europe. Commentators are caught up in a debate over whether such movement is best understood in terms of social dumping and hence a race to the bottom, or in terms of business opportunities and benefits for firms, states and migrants. The argument put forward in this article is that both approaches are inadequate in that they focus attention on a linear East-to-West movement and discuss this movement from the vantage point of the state, businesses and trade unions in the country of destination. It is our suggestion that such readings of intra-European labour migration fail to grasp the changes in labour force behaviour engendered by freedom of movement and European Union citizenship. In order to gain a clearer understanding of emerging migration patterns in the enlarged Europe, this article adopts mobility as the analytical lens though which to examine the integration of labour markets as well as the tensions between capital, trade unions and labour to which mobility gives rise. Building on fieldwork and interviews with migrant workers conducted at Foxconn electronics assembly plants in the Czech Republic, the article illustrates processes of both segregation and mobilisation produced by intra-European labour mobility, and suggests that the term 'multinational' worker is best suited to convey the experiences and practices of this emergent workforce.
A focus on the evils of traffi cking is a way of depoliticising the debate on migration.T raffi cking is in the news. It is on the political agenda, both nationally and internationally. Thousands of individuals, hundreds of groups, dozens of newspapers are determined to stamp it out. This focus on traffi cking consistently refl ects and reinforces deep public concern about prostitution/sex work, and also about immigration, and the abuse and exploitation it so frequently involves. So to challenge the expression, or some of the actions taken as a response to this concern, is akin to saying that one endorses slavery or is against motherhood and apple pie. Traffi cking is a theme that is supposed to bring us all together. But we believe it is necessary to tread the line of challenging motherhood and apple pie while not endorsing slavery, because the moral panic over traffi cking is diverting attention from the structural causes of the abuse of migrant workers. Concern becomes focused on the evil wrongdoers rather than more systemic factors. In particular it ignores the state's approach to migration and employment, which effectively constructs groups of non-citizens who can be treated as unequal with impunity. 135
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