Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe

Esson, James

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2014.927733

Cited by 37 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Indeed, there are aspects of the trans-continental trade in football labour that have emerged over the last two decades that can bring about the opposite. Chief amongst these are football related trafficking and exploitative work practices involving footballers from the global South (Esson, 2015b;Hawkins, 2016), two of the issues that the SDG Targets explicitly identify as mitigating against developmental outcomes from migration.…”

Section: Sport and The Migration-development Nexusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sport and the Sustainable Development Goals: Where is the policy coherence?

Lindsey

Darby

2018

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This article addresses the urgent need for critical analysis of the relationships between sport and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) enshrined in the United Nations' global development framework, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Importantly, there has yet to be any substantial academic exploration of the implications of the position accorded to sport as 'an important enabler' of the aims of 2030 Agenda and its broad set of SDGs. In beginning to address this gap, we draw on the concept of policy coherence for two reasons. Firstly, the designation of a specific SDG Target for policy coherence is recognition of its centrality in working towards SDGs that are considered as 'integrated and indivisible'. Secondly, the concept of policy coherence is centred on a dualism that enables holistic examination of both synergies through which the contribution of sport to the SDGs can be enhanced as well as incoherencies by which sport may detract from such outcomes. Our analysis progresses through three examples that focus on the common orientation of the Sport for Development and Peace 'movement' towards education-orientated objectives aligned with SDG 4; potential synergies between sport participation policies and the SDG 3 Target for reducing non-communicable diseases; and practices within professional football in relation to several migration-related SDG Targets. These examples show the relevance of the SDGs across diverse sectors of the sport industry and illustrate complexities within and across countries that make pursuit of comprehensive policy coherence infeasible. Nevertheless, our analyses lead us to encourage both policy makers and researchers to continue to utilise the concept of policy coherence as a valuable lens to identify and consider factors that may enable and constrain various potential contributions of sport to a range of SDGs.

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Section: Sport and The Migration-development Nexusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sport and the Sustainable Development Goals: Where is the policy coherence?

Lindsey

Darby

2018

International Review for the Sociology of Sport

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“…Campana, 2016). Esson's (2015aEsson's ( , 2015bEsson's ( , 2015c original research on sport trafficking from Africa to Europe, via multiple points of transit, is important here for exemplifying the need for a more holistic spatial perspective of trafficking. It is also vital for population geography to more fully disentangle the unrelated and inter-connected forms, processes and geographies of trafficking, such as the differentials and overlaps between sex trafficking and domestic servitude, and so on.…”

Section: Progressing Knowledge Of Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population geography I

Smith

2017

Progress in Human Geography

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This first report explores how understandings of human trafficking have progressed within population geography. Exemplified by studies of exploitative labour migration, population geography has made implicit contributions by stressing the value of a geographic perspective of the webs of inter-connections and links between different places and trafficking. In addition, dominant ideas of linear trafficking processes have been disrupted, via evidencing the informal involvement of families in the phases of recruitment, transportation, and control. I argue that a more encompassing, inter-disciplinary tenet could be woven into population studies of trafficking, by more explicitly engaging with social science debates. Embedding the legal, global definition of trafficking into wider studies of migration is paramount for this direction of travel. There is also merit in population geography advancing understandings by adopting holistic lenses of enquiry, connecting-up with (sub-)disciplinary geographic studies of migration and trafficking in the Global South and Global North. Studies of trafficking provide a potentially fruitful terrain for population geography to deliver multi-disciplinary, impactful research of a key global challenge, to inform policies to prevent and mitigate the ills of trafficking, and progress conceptual and theoretical understandings of trafficking. KeywordsHuman trafficking, migration, population change, labour, exploitation I IntroductionMigration studies have been intensified within human geography by the so-called 'migration crisis ' (Davies and Isakjee, 2015;Collyer, 2016;Raghuram, 2016), sparking countless recent discussions of smuggling, asylum-seeking, refugees, and precarious and insecure movements; as international migration per se is firmly thrust into international political, policy, media and academic spotlights (Smith et al., 2015). Yet, there continues to be a relative dearth of studies of human trafficking in geographic scholarship, despite this unprecedented attention to conceptually-overlapping forms of migration (O'Connell Davidson, 2010;. This is particularly surprising within the context of population geography, given the ascendency of migration studies within the sub-discipline and trafficking being a form of migration that is in the limelight.First, trafficking is symbolic of wider contemporary global trends of the marketization and growth of migration industries within the 'age of migration ' (King, 2012). Processes of trafficking, for instance, are expressive of King's (2002: 95) assertion that: 'Migration has become a new global business with a constantly shifting set of agents, mechanisms, routes, prices and niches'. Indeed, King uses the example of trafficking to illustrate how market concepts have more fully penetrated into migration processes, describing the growth of a 'Migration PLC' and the proliferation of traffickers, agents, intermediaries, and monetary frameworks for places of origin, routes/transits and destination. In this way, more research on traffi...

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“…Encounters with fake talent scouts did not happen every day, but it was one of several examples of football migration is directly linked to recruitment between two clubs registered with their national associations, involves a certified agent or lawyer, and players enter a destination country legally (Esson, 2015). African football migrants will typically begin by playing for a local neighbourhood team or youth academy (under 17s), then progress to a senior amateur or professional side.…”

Section: Justifying Your Inclusion In An Uncertain Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As noted by Darby et al (2007) and Poli (2010b) Alongside this research on football labour migration studies have emerged focusing on the issue of football related human trafficking (Donnelly and Petherick, 2004;Esson, 2015, Poli, 2010b. In short, this is where after handing over money to individuals claiming to be certified football agents, the player is promised a playing contract or trial with a foreign club.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although entailing two rather different migratory processes, attempts to understand African football labour migration and human trafficking through football suffer from a common shortcoming. The agency of African actors and broader understandings of the young people involved are usually conspicuous by their absence (Esson, 2015;van der Meij and Darby, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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You have to try your luck: male Ghanaian youth and the uncertainty of football migration

Esson

2015

Environ Plan A

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The migration of male African youth within the football industry, particularly cases involving human trafficking, has become a subject of academic and political interest. This article contributes to work on this topic and to literature on the agency of youth in the urban Global South by turning the academic gaze away from European actors and settings, and towards their African counterparts.Drawing upon research conducted in Ghana, the article reveals how youth perceive migration through football as a solution to the socio--economic uncertainty and life constraints facing them in neoliberal Accra. This perception is tied to broader representations of spatial mobility as a precursor for social mobility. Youth attempt to achieve spatial mobility through football by 'trying their luck', a form of social navigation that is used to mediate the uncertainty associated with this strategy for realizing spatial change. Through illustrating why youth want to be spatially mobile and how they attempt to do so through football, this article demonstrates why studies of African football migration need to engage better with how conditions inside the football industry interact with those beyond it.

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Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe

Cited by 37 publications

References 30 publications

Sport and the Sustainable Development Goals: Where is the policy coherence?

Sport and the Sustainable Development Goals: Where is the policy coherence?

Population geography I

You have to try your luck: male Ghanaian youth and the uncertainty of football migration

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