EARLY RESEARCHERS Special Edition: New Approaches to Understand and Address Contemporary Forms of Slavery

Guest Editors: Cheryll Alipio, Hannah Baumeister, Marcela González-Agüero, Wendy Stickle, and Ana Valverde-Cano

Introduction to New Approaches to Understand and Address Contemporary Forms of Slavery

Cheryll Alipio, Hannah Baumeister, Marcela González-Agüero, Wendy Stickle, and Ana Valverde-Cano

According to the best available estimates, five in every 1000 people are trapped in a slavery-like situation. Exploitation adapts over time in response to changes in socio-legal and political contexts. Thus, new ideas and approaches are vital to understand and combat this complex and multifaceted institution. The want for innovation was apparent at a recent early career researcher workshop in 2020 on modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking, co-sponsored by Universitas 21 (U21), a global network of research-intensive universities unified by the value of collaboration and internationalisation, and the University of Nottingham’s Researcher Academy and the Rights Lab.

Syrians’ only option – Rethinking unfree labour through the study of displaced agricultural workers in the Middle East

Ann-Christin Zuntz, Mackenzie Klema, Shaher Abdullateef, Esraa Almashhor, Salim Faisal Alnabolsi, Sinem Sefa Akay, Bürge Akbulut, Selin Ayaes, Ertan Karabiyik, and Lisa Boden

This article revisits the notion of “unfree labour” through the study of displaced Syrians working informally in Middle Eastern agriculture, drawing on interviews with Syrian agricultural workers and their intermediaries in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. By taking a political economy perspective, we argue that the International Labour Organization’s definition of “forced labour” does not capture Syrians’ experience of “unfreedom”, born out of the interplay between restrictive asylum policies in Middle Eastern host countries and globalised food systems requiring cheap, mobile labour. Our ethnographic approach also reveals that Syrian refugees are recruited into global supply chains through kinship networks.

Forced Marriage and Modern Slavery: Analysing Marriage as a “Choiceless Choice”

Helen McCabe, Wendy Stickle, PhD, and Hannah Baumeister

Several international conventions, and domestic law in fifty-two countries, ban forced marriage, and Human Rights conventions insist that marriage should only be entered into with the “free and full consent” of both parties. Using rational choice theory, we show that a closer examination of this concept reveals the extremely “bounded” nature of consent to marriage, such that marriage may be a “choiceless choice”, even where such marriages would not – in law – be considered “forced”. We do not use this to argue that all marriages are forms of modern slavery, but to urge for caution, and further research into the ways in which the powers attaching to the rights of ownership are exercised by one person over another could be manifested in marriage (i.e. could be de facto slavery), and the extent to which forced marriage necessarily involves a loss of sexual autonomy and non-commercial labour extracted under menace of penalty “under the guise of marriage” (i.e. be a form of modern slavery as defined by the International Labour Organisation and Walk Free). We agree that this might be manifested in a lack of consent to the marriage in the initial ceremony. However, we argue that this focus misses a variety of other ways in which some marriages could rightly be considered forms of modern slavery either narrowly or broadly understood, or as forms of human trafficking.

A Feminist Analysis of the Trafficking of Women and Girls into China for the Purpose of Forced Marriage and Childbearing

Amelia Watkins-Smith

The trafficking of women and girls into China for forced marriage and childbearing is a major social problem in our global society. This article serves to improve understanding of the problem by conducting a thematic analysis of 46 narratives of survivors from Cambodia, Myanmar, North Korea, and Vietnam. The theoretical lens of social constructivist feminism is utilised to illustrate how constructions of gender evolve throughout and within the process to form a multi-level system of gender which dictates power inequalities, thus both facilitating and justifying the trafficking of women and girls into China for forced marriage and childbearing.

Human Rights Through the Eyes of Bonded Labourers in India

Elena Samonova, PhD

Human rights are one of the most characteristic ideas of our time and human rights talk is widely used today to discuss various problems, including modern slavery. The human rights-based approaches to slavery are adopted by various development actors. This paper aims to examine how human rights are understood by Indian bonded labourers who participate in rights-based programs run by NGOs. The paper demonstrates the links between the concepts of human rights, human dignity and normality and argues that the discourse of human rights provides a powerful foundation for development of agency among bonded labourers.

Campaigning Against Modern Slavery: Social Assets for Business Action

Dr Akilah Jardine and Reem Muaid

One of the great challenges to campaigning against modern slavery is the availability of financial resources. Yet businesses have considerable social assets that can act as a major resource for meaningful anti-slavery campaigns. Inspired by social capital theory, this article reviews the Co-op’s modern slavery campaign of 2017–2020 with the aim of identifying social assets that can be utilised by businesses in campaigning against modern slavery. It identifies four assets inherent in most businesses—identity, leadership, networks, and people, and discusses how these were leveraged by the Co-op to contribute to anti-slavery action.

Global Patterns of Forced Labor in Island Southeast Asia

Cheryll Alipio and Yancey Orr

Island Southeast Asia has long been a site of cross-border slavery and migration. Utilizing archival sources, ethnographic data, and news reports, the article considers patterns of forced labor in the case studies of domestic servitude and household work from the ata of Indonesia, the alipin of the Philippines, and foreign domestic workers from both countries. From a critical review of historical slavery to contemporary transnational migration, the article analyzes the sociocultural, economic, linguistic, geographical, and political dynamics at play and reorients the focus of slavery scholarship from the Atlantic context to include the wider implications of intra-Asia slavery.