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For over a decade, politicians and governments have been joining with nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to decry "human trafficking", a phenomenon purported to be a hugely profitable business in which criminals transport millions of victims around the globe for purposes of exploitation, and which is routinely described as a "modern slave trade". As Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, put it at a major UN conference on human trafficking held in Vienna in February 2008, "Two hundred years after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, we have the obligation to fight a crime that has no place in the twenty-first century. Let's call it what it is: modern slavery." When matters are framed in this way, anti-trafficking campaigners appear to be continuing in the tradition of the abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and calls for governments to adopt and enforce legal and other measures against trafficking seemingly resemble nineteenth-century calls for governments to outlaw the slave trade and slavery.
The fight against a phenomenon presented as the modern equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade has enormous popular appeal. No votes will be lost by politicians who condemn slavery, and plenty of funds are likely to be raised by organisations that pledge themselves to combat it. Nobody is in favour of slavery, and the struggle against it therefore appears as a simple and straightforward moral imperative, a project that stands outside and above politics. And yet, as this article will argue, there are significant differences between the contemporary phenomenon described as "trafficking" and the transatlantic slave trade, differences that-if acknowledged-muddy the moral waters and dissolve all semblance of political consensus on the nature and causes of the problem of trafficking, as well as the remedies for it. The metaphor of slavery depoliticises what is actually a highly political issue, and in so doing, renders invisible the role of the state in constructing the conditions under which some groups become vulnerable to various forms of abuse and exploitation.
Trafficking and Slavery: Some Differences
The most obvious contrast between contemporary "victims of trafficking" (VoTs) and Africans who, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, were forcibly transported to the Americas is that whereas the latter had no pre-existing...