Jan Tik/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Twelve months ago, we set ourselves the task of becoming ‘an alternative to the many “modern-day slavery hubs” dotted across the conventional media.’ Years of work and research in the ‘anti-slavery’ and ‘anti-trafficking’ fields had shown us just how great the need for this was. The media landscape was dominated by shallow, sensationalist reporting; the politics rarely ever better than anodyne. ‘Our editors will marshal the best of contemporary scholarship’, we promised, ‘to provide informed, nuanced, and focused analysis’. We wanted to insert structural critique where previously there had been too little and challenge the mis- and dis-information disseminated by the economically and socially powerful, who have a stake in maintaining the status quo.
We knew there was going to be a lot to say, but even we have been surprised by the sheer number of scholars waiting for an outlet such as Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) to emerge. Just one year later, we’ve published over 180 articles by nearly as many authors from dozens of different countries. These we’ve grouped into major themes, organising them into the world’s first freely available public e-syllabus on forced labour, trafficking and slavery. We will release the complete BTS Short Course this December as a nine-volume, 900-page series of open access e-books replete with the observations of some of the sharpest minds in the field. We hope that this will become an invaluable resource to students, teachers, activists and concerned citizens.
