Slavery Versus Marronage as an Analytic Lens on “Trafficking”

Davidson, Julia O’Connell

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-63347-9_26

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“… 2015 ; Garelli and Tazzioli 2018 ; Mountz 2003 ; Scheel 2019 ), I argue that the representation of smugglers and traffickers as irregular mobility facilitators plays out differently in migrant sending versus receiving countries. In the receiving countries, irregular mobility is understood as a threat to the immigration state which uses the figure of traffickers and smugglers to justify restrictive, often violent, immigration policies (O’Connell Davidson 2015 ; Vigneswaran 2020 ). Whereas, in the sending countries, irregular mobility is considered a threat to the citizens whose welfare and protection in the foreign labour markets is/should be the prime concern for the sending state (Hwang 2018 ; Lee 2017 ).…”

Section: Situating Traffickersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal

Bhagat

2022

Antipode

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state's restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive antitrafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as "traffickers".

show abstract

Section: Situating Traffickersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal

Bhagat

2022

Antipode

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Yet in reality, delineating singular recruiter motives and responsibility in the trafficking process is difficult, if not impossible (Spener 2016; Schapendonk 2018). Increasingly, academic experts contend that who is defined as a “human trafficker” is driven, or produced, by the contentious politics of migration, suggesting that changes in laws and regulations, particularly regarding border crossings, can redefine whether someone will be considered a broker or human trafficker (Brachet 2018; O’Connell Davidson 2015). Moreover, critical political economy scholars emphasize that forced labor and human trafficking are, in fact, a routine, systemic feature of modern-day capitalism in which vulnerability to trafficking is generated by state practices and immigration controls, rather than an aberrant exceptional behavior exhibited by a few “criminal recruiters” in migrants’ origin countries (LeBaron 2020; Jones, Ksaifi and Clark 2022).…”

Section: Recruitment Human Trafficking and Forced Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, research on migration has increasingly pivoted away from privileging the individual experience of migrants toward studying the infrastructure that facilitates or hinders and controls mobility (Cranston, Schapendonk and Spaan 2018; Zhang, Sanchez and Achilli 2018; Xiang and Lindquist 2018; Deshingkar 2019); large microlevel quantitative datasets are especially valuable to complement in-depth qualitative studies. Here, we offer a cautionary note: to avoid misinterpretations and reductive narratives, it is important to conduct statistical analyses in the context of theoretically informed literature that recognizes the politics of migration and the agency of migrants (O’Connell Davidson 2015; LeBaron 2020; Deshingkar 2019). Our analysis suggests the urgent need for better definitions, tools, and measures in human trafficking research that focuses on recruitment.…”

Section: Research Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labor Recruitment and Human Trafficking: Analysis of a Global Trafficking Survivor Database

Fabbri

Stöckl

Zimmerman

et al. 2023

International Migration Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the past decade, third-party labor recruiters who facilitate employment for migrant workers across low- and middle-income countries have often been considered by the counter-trafficking community as one of the main entry points into human trafficking. In response, anti-trafficking prevention programs have increasingly focused on addressing exploitative recruitment in migrants’ origin countries. Such programs may advocate for increased regulation of migration, greater enforcement actions against unlicensed recruiters, stricter ethical codes of conduct for recruiters and employers, and more pre-departure information about recruitment for migrants. Yet, there remains limited research about the relationship between prospective migrants, recruiters, and human trafficking, and the relative importance of third-party recruitment in the trafficking process. This Research Note draws on the world's largest database of individual victims of trafficking cases, the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Global Victim of Trafficking Database (VoTD), to examine the role and characteristics of recruitment of trafficked victims. The VoTD contains information on nearly 50,000 trafficking victims who were registered for assistance from 2002 to June 2018. Our analysis shows that 94 percent of trafficked victims were recruited, in a broad sense (i.e., not only by third-party intermediaries). Additionally, the data presented here suggest that the relationship between recruitment and trafficking is complex and that forced labor is embedded within the wider structural issues around low-wage labor migration that lead to exploitative work conditions. Interventions to address human trafficking will benefit from strategies that target systemic issues constraining or harming low-wage labor. Further, these findings highlight the value of large-scale administrative datasets in migration research.

show abstract

“New Slavery”, Modern Marronage and the Multiple Afterlives of Plantations in Contemporary Italy

Peano

2023

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With reference to the Italian agribusiness sector, this chapter probes the specters of “the plantation” as the (ob)scene of discourses on “modern slavery,” and traces alternative genealogies of the current organization and representation of migrant farm labor. The history of the transatlantic trade and the New-World plantation has a prominent presence in this field of representation. But multiple, geographically and temporally heterogeneous plantation pasts and specters of enslavement haunt contemporary agribusiness districts, the slums and labor camps which punctuate them, and their patterns of labor management, in different and even contradictory ways. “The plantation” and “slavery” as its principle of organization may be evoked in diminishing or oppressive terms that work as a distancing mechanism to occlude subjectivities and struggles. At the same time, redemptive and oppositional conjurings of the New-World plantation emerge from the coinage of the notion of a “Black Mediterranean” as a redemptive parallel to the “Black Atlantic,” and in workers’ myriad references to practices and cultures of marronage first developed in cross-Atlantic exchanges. Yet, other scenes, recursive patterns, localized geographies and buried genealogies are shown to be equally crucial to understand contemporary forms of extraction, containment and racialization, and for truly abolitionist struggles.

show abstract

Slavery Versus Marronage as an Analytic Lens on “Trafficking”

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti‐Trafficking in Nepal

Labor Recruitment and Human Trafficking: Analysis of a Global Trafficking Survivor Database

“New Slavery”, Modern Marronage and the Multiple Afterlives of Plantations in Contemporary Italy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About