Contemporary forms of human trafficking are analysed from a variety of different and sometimes competing perspectives. Rarely is there consensus among academics, politicians or activists regarding what ‘trafficking’ is or what to do about it. Despite these differences, contemporary anti-trafficking discourses agree on one crucial idea: there is such a thing as ‘trafficking’ that can be discovered, analysed, and told.
‘Trafficking’ however, is not a neutral concept into which facts can be easily inserted, and from which policy responses can be efficiently derived. Instead, the ‘reality’ of trafficking is created by those discourses that have become dominant and accepted as ‘truth’. These discourses allow for particular understandings and actions, while foreclosing others. It is through these discourses therefore, that ‘trafficking’ emerges as a phenomenon that can be governed.
The convergence we’ve seen among otherwise disparate—and at times contradictory—narratives results from their common use of conceptual binaries to render the complexities of trafficking understandable: legal versus illegal migration, slavery versus free labour, or victim versus criminal. These binaries, which often become gendered and racialised, serve to articulate identities, notions of belonging, and conceptions of development in ways that silence the challenging voices of the global ‘subalterns’. The subalterns, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are not simply those that are oppressed or disenfranchised. They are those that are oppressed and disenfranchised in such a way that forecloses any possibility of moving upwards. The global subalterns therefore, are those populations that are removed from all lines of social mobility, relegated to a space that is not a space, a position of political invisibility and misrecognition, which does not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action.
