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Over the last twelve months, Beyond Trafficking and Slavery has offered up dozens of empirically- and theoretically-derived critical reflections on forced labour, prostitution, child labour, trafficking, and other conditions discursively constructed as modern forms of slavery. Many of these contributions have also lifted the veil on the sensationalism, misrepresentation, and superficial analysis that dominate mainstream perspectives. In doing so, they have demonstrated the prime risk of labelling virtually all forms of human suffering today as ‘modern slavery’: that the obfuscation of the complexities surrounding the phenomena and the creation of inadequate solutions either fail to address the problem or harm those identified as victims.
Our agenda has not simply been to produce or elicit counter-hegemonic narratives, but to do so constructively. Wary of the ‘ivory tower’ critique so often slung against academic interventions of this kind, many authors have sought to highlight the practical lessons of their research. They have done so with the hope of providing practitioners, politicians, and activists with ‘actionable’ alternatives to their current strategies, ones that are more sensitive to the rights and wishes of the ‘victims’.
