Legal Institutions and Human Trafficking in a Shifting Climate

While international law and climate change researchers have shown how legal institutions and climate shocks impact human trafficking in origin and destination countries, little attention is given to the intermediary countries through which individuals are trafficked. We develop and test a two-part cost-based explanation of how anti-trafficking legalization and climate shocks impact trafficking patterns through intermediary countries. We argue that the diffusion of anti-trafficking laws induces pressures on traffickers to diversify their trafficking routes. We then theorize that climate shocks confound the effect of legal institutions by incentivizing traffickers to focus their resources on mitigating climate impacts. Evidence from inferential network analysis of human trafficking networks mined from the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report (2009--2016) supports our arguments.