Slavery and the Revival of Anti-slavery Activism

Abstract

Slavery had been legally outlawed everywhere in the world by the end of the twentieth century. Yet as the millennium dawned, there was a revival of anti-slavery activism. In 2000, the long-established, British-based NGO Anti-Slavery International acquired a new US-based sister organization, Free the Slaves (the two have since severed their links), and many more anti-slavery NGOs were founded over the next twelve years in the US, Australia and Western European countries, including Stop the Traffik, Not For Sale, End Slavery Now, CNN Freedom Project, Alliance Against Modern Slavery, and Walk Free Foundation. Building on claims about 'human trafficking' as a vast and growing organized criminal business that have been widely made by governmental and intergovernmental actors since the 1990s, and equating 'trafficking' with slave-trading, this 'new abolitionist' movement insists that slavery is not merely a persistent, but also an expanding global problem (Batstone, 2007:5). In 1999, Kevin Bales, co-founder of the antislavery NGO, Free the Slaves, estimated that some 27 million souls were affected by 'trafficking' and other forms of 'new slavery'. In 2013, the Walk Free Foundation, assisted by Bales, launched a report titled The Global Slavery Index (GSI), which enlarged that estimate to 29.8 million. The following year, the GSI set the number of 'modern slaves' in the contemporary world at 35.8 million. The 2016 GSI

Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural–urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a ‘climate precarity’ approach

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Modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change: Fisheries, field, forests and factories

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Diffuse Drivers of Modern Slavery: From Microfinance to Unfree Labour in Cambodia

“…Since the late 1990s modern slavery has become prevalent within development studies as a key area of concern and has led to the rise of an associated industry of NGOs, corporate social practices, and policy and legal instruments at national and supra-national levels. Termed the 'new abolitionism' movement (Brace and O'Connell Davidson, 2018), this powerful lobby castigates modern slavery as something that must be ended, eradicated, or abolished, largely through helping people to get out of modern slavery and facilitating their rehabilitation. The emphasis is therefore on particularly exploitative relationships and on 'rescuing' individuals.…”