Human Trafficking: Ideology, Governance and Coloniality in the History of Antitrafficking Efforts

Although human trafficking has been presented as a global emergency in need of urgent policing and rescue, there is in fact little agreement about what it refers to in theory or practice. Hence, rather than revisiting definitional debates, this review synthesizes the critical antitrafficking scholarship that conceptualizes human trafficking as a discursive and political phenomenon. Challenging narratives of exceptionalism and crisis, it starts from the premise that antitrafficking efforts have appeared in times of heightened mobility and social change. Far from merely protecting victims, less even addressing a self-evident crime, such efforts have invoked moral panics, disciplined marginalized populations on the move, and repurposed colonial epistemologies in the pursuit of liberal governance. Addressing the deeper structural inequalities at stake requires us to not only move beyond the state's facile binary of victim and perpetrator but also imagine solidarity in more expansive ways.