Why is the international community so concerned with the fate of prostitutes abroad? And why does the story of trafficking sound so familiar? In this pioneering new book, Jo Doezema argues that the current concern with trafficking in women is a modern manifestation of the myth of white slavery. Combining historical analysis with contemporary investigation, this book sheds light on the current preoccupations with trafficking in women. It examines in detail sex worker reactions to the myth of trafficking, questions the current feminist preoccupation with the 'suffering female body' and argues that feminism needs to move towards the creation of new myths. The analysis in this book is controversial but crucial, an alternative to the current panic discourses around trafficking in women. An essential read for anyone who is concerned with the increased movement of women internationally and the attempts of international and national governments to regulate this flow.

Although human trafficking has a long and ignoble history, it is only recently that trafficking has become a major political issue for states and the international community and the subject of detailed international rules. Anne T. Gallagher calls on her direct experience working within the United Nations to chart the development of new international laws on this issue. She links these rules to the international law of state responsibility as well as key norms of international human rights law, transnational criminal law, refugee law and international criminal law, in the process identifying and explaining the major legal obligations of states with respect to preventing trafficking, protecting and supporting victims, and prosecuting perpetrators. This book is a groundbreaking work: a unique and valuable resource for policymakers, advocates, practitioners and scholars working in this controversial and important field.

We are living in a time of great panic about “sex trafficking”—an idea whose meaning has been expanded beyond any real usefulness by evangelicals, conspiracy theorists, anti-prostitution feminists, and politicians with their own agendas. This is especially visible during events like the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, when claims circulate that as many as 40,000 women and girls will be sex trafficked. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Brazil as well as interviews with sex workers, policymakers, missionaries, and activists in Russia, Qatar, Japan, the UK, and South Africa, Gregory Mitchell shows that despite baseless statistical claims to the contrary, sex trafficking never increases as a result of these global mega-events—but police violence against sex workers always does. While advocates have long decried this myth, Mitchell follows the discourse across host countries to ask why this panic so easily embeds during these mega-events. What fears animate it? Who profits? He charts the move of sex trafficking into the realm of the spectacular—street protests, awareness-raising campaigns, telenovelas, social media, and celebrity spokespeople—where it then spreads across borders. This trend is dangerous because these events happen in moments of nationalist fervor during which fears of foreigners and migrants are heightened and easily exploited to frightening ends.

This volume brings together a cast of leading experts to carefully explore how the history and iconography of slavery has been invoked to support a series of government interventions, activist projects, legal instruments, and rhetorical performances. However well-intentioned these interventions might be, they nonetheless remain subject to a host of limitations and complications. Recent efforts to combat contemporary slavery are too often sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial and, therefore, end up failing the crucial test of speaking truth to power. The widely held notion that antislavery is one of those rare issues that "transcends" politics or ideology is only sustainable because the underlying issues at stake have been constructed and demarcated in a way that minimizes direct challenges to dominant political and economic interests. This must change. By providing an original approach to the underlying issues at stake, Contemporary Slavery will help readers understand the political practices that have been concealed beneath the popular rhetoric and establishes new conversations between scholars of slavery and trafficking and scholars of human rights and social movements. Contributors: Jean Allain, Jonathan Blagbrough, Roy Brooks, Annie Bunting, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Andrew Crane, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Benjamin Lawrance, Joel Quirk, and Darshan Vigneswaran

We Still Demand! recovers vibrant and unsung histories of sex and gender activism across Canada from the 1970s to the present. Departing from conventional accounts, this book demonstrates the varied nature of resistance and the productive power of remembering sex and gender struggles. In attending to the records and accounts that have slipped out of view, it also redraws the boundaries between activism and scholarship. The first part of the book remembers these struggles. Drawing on a rich history of activism, the contributors recall 1970s same-sex marriage activism; early queer union organizing; organizing against police repression; early trans organizing; the emergence of dyke marches; the organization of black queer space at Toronto Pride events. The second part of the book rethinks past and current struggles. The authors address gender “passing” in historical research; lesbian s/m porn; sex-worker organizing; problems with organizing against “human trafficking”; queer immigration and refugee struggles; and trans identity. By recovering the history of activism and outlining contemporary challenges, We Still Demand! provides a vital rewriting of the history of sex and gender activism that will enlighten current struggles and activate new forms of resistance.

Sexuality is often understood to be uniquely private and intimate--something that can and should be protected from capitalism's influence. This book argues, in contrast, that the histories of capitalism and sexuality are closely intertwined. Integral to this story has been the illusion that economic and sexual practices are tied to fundamentally different realms. Focusing on the history of sex work in Britain, the book shows that capitalism has long needed theconstruction of artificial boundaries around sex and work in order to extract profit from sexual labor, both paid and unpaid.

A century and a half after the abolition of slavery in the United States, survivors of contemporary forms of enslavement from around the world have revived a powerful tool of the abolitionist movement: first-person narratives of slavery and freedom. Just as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others used autobiographical testimonies in the fight to eradicate slavery, today’s new slave narrators play a crucial role in shaping an antislavery agenda. Their writings unveil the systemic underpinnings of global slavery while critiquing the precarity of their hard-fought freedom. At the same time, the demands of antislavery organizations, religious groups, and book publishers circumscribe the voices of the enslaved, coopting their narratives in support of alternative agendas. In this pathbreaking interdisciplinary study, Laura T. Murphy argues that the slave narrative has reemerged as a twenty-first-century genre that has gained new currency in the context of the memoir boom, post-9/11 anti-Islamic sentiment, and conservative family-values politics. She analyzes a diverse range of dozens of book-length accounts of modern slavery from Africa, Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, examining the narrative strategies that survivors of slavery employ to make their experiences legible and to promote a reinvigorated antislavery agenda. By putting these stories into conversation with one another, The New Slave Narrative reveals an emergent survivor-centered counterdiscourse of collaboration and systemic change that offers an urgent critique of the systems that maintain contemporary slavery, as well as of the human rights industry and the antislavery movement.

An understanding of International Relations exclusively as a sphere plagued by countless known and unknown risks, looming disasters and imminent threats leaves an important aspect of the study of politics unengaged – that of the human herself. The Politics of Bodies at Risk re-engages and re-conceptualizes politics from the point of view of the everyday experiences of human materiality living with risk across geopolitical worlds and state borders. Re-imagining human bodies as productive, singular and embodied materiality removes them from an understanding of “life” in an age of terror as pejorative, dispensable, and burdensome, enabling a novel understanding of politics as an embodiment of human bodies with risk, and not as a sphere of activity aimed primarily at managing, silencing, and normalizing the risky other. Drawing on case studies from several countries and across several disciplines, The Politics of Bodies at Risk investigates the possibility of developing an understanding of the productive possibilities contained in engaging with the human body as a site of a radical interconnectedness between politics, singularity, risk, and security.

This is the first full-length book on the work of ‘global Igbo’ writer Chris Abani. The volume dedicates a chapter to each of Abani’s fiction books, the two novellas Becoming Abigail (2006) and Song for Night (2007), the three novels GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), which are read against the grain of Abani’s most important essays and poetical production. By combining close readings and more theoretical reflections, this volume provides a significant insight for both scholars and students interested in the literature produced by the emerging African voices in the twentieth-first century, in the debate about human rights, and in general in how aesthetics is deeply linked with ethics.

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present. History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.