Daily laborers call me Farmer, but bonded laborers call me My Farmer and My Owner.
—Prajapati (Interviewee 64)
We are like family.
—Goral (Interviewee 90)
This book began its life in a brothel. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had turned my attention to the issue of human trafficking. Stories of women and children trafficked by large criminal networks and then subjected to systematic degradation struck me to my core. Certainly something—
anything—must be done about something that is so unequivocally wrong. I proceeded to volunteer for a new human rights group focused exclusively on a number of justice-related issues, trafficking chief among them. This work connected me to the organization’s outreach efforts, and later to fieldwork, in South Asia. As an investigator in rural India, I was tasked with two things: first, investigating cases of bonded labor in kilns, quarries, and farms; and second, documenting instances of trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Building a case against those trafficking into brothels was no mean feat. My first task was to document the presence of underage girls in private establishments. The assumption was that young and underage girls, children really, were regularly made available in brothels that catered to both domestic clientele and international tourists. The investigative team welcomed me, since they were already relatively well known to the managers and enforcers who ran the establishments. I represented a new face able to pose convincingly as a john in search of certain sexual services. This is how I found myself wearing a wire, geared up with surveillance equipment, inside a brothel.
The routine was simple. I would pose as a sex tourist and ask to see the goods. I would insist the women presented to me were not young. When their replacements got younger, I insisted they were not young enough. Feigning outrage that they had nobody young enough for my tastes, I would storm out, rejoin the investigative team, review the videotape—yes, tape—and then collaborate with law enforcement to develop a plan for the raid that would rescue the victims and hopefully lead to the prosecution of the perpetrators.
I grew disillusioned with this approach when it became clear to me that the substantial effort being put into prosecuting the perpetrators was not matched with a similar investment in the care and reintegration of the survivor. In telling this story I mean to highlight my empathy for the urgency over human trafficking that has gripped the international community. Certainly something must be done to help women and children suffering from violent exploitation. Collaboration with law enforcement, the rescue of innocents, and their protection in aftercare facilities were all laudable goals. But what often happened next in government remand homes was abuse and exploitation, thus driving survivors back into vulnerability and victimization.
The solution, I came to realize, is not at the individual level alone. Short-term interventions are necessary and important, but the longer-term work of sustainable emancipation requires social adaptation and evolution. Thinking in social terms requires taking all parties seriously. Here I have focused on human rights
violators. They break federal and international laws, but they also abide by local norms that may seem more relevant to the issues at hand. How they respond to movement challenges tells us a lot about what happens next—whether exploitation ends decisively or mutates insidiously. While such outcomes are rarely clear-cut and are often difficult to trace, an emphasis on the process from perpetrators’ perspectives tells us something about why exploitation persists as well as whether and how it might reemerge.
This study contributes an empirical case to scholarship on contemporary slavery. I hope it also has implications for social-movement theory. In this book, I have explored antislavery community mobilization using an interactive, relational, and process-oriented approach to both contentious politics and subsequent settlement. This approach draws on the political-process model advanced by Doug McAdam and his collaborators. My emphasis is on the fact that collective action emerges in response to broad change processes and is then patterned by perceptions, resources, tactics, and ongoing interactions between claimant and incumbent. This process is iterative, as actors act and react to one another over time, learning and adapting across two distinct stages of contestation, both as challenges emerge and as they are resolved. Finally, this approach is relational, as incumbents and claimants are often operating in some cultural, temporal, and spatial proximity. In this concluding chapter, I hope to draw some of these strands together, provide a broad overview of the empirical story and a brief recap of the theoretical argument, suggest some implications and outstanding questions for current and future scholarship, and end with what I think of as the broader ethical implications for how we think about periods of change.
A PROCESS-BASED APPROACH TO SOCIAL MOVEMENT EMERGENCE AND IMPACT
Contemporary slaveholders have cognitive barriers that prevent them from realizing the extent to which they had bought into their own paternalistic rationalizations. As a result, they are ill-prepared to resist movement efforts. Interview data suggest oppressors understood that they were taking advantage of laborers’ dependency, sometimes passively, but often actively and deliberately. Yet slaveholding landlords had also convinced themselves that they were doing bonded laborers a favor. As long as the oppressed lacked organizational resources and political opportunities, the oppressors could continue business as usual. Over time—decades, generations, centuries—exploitative practices intertwined with cultural norms and supportive ideologies. Exploitation went unchallenged because it was a taken-for-granted seam in the social fabric. Exploitative practices were justified on the grounds that the relationship between oppressor and the oppressed was part of the natural order, and this incumbent mindset pervaded society more broadly.
Over time, however, things change. New roads are built, new laws are passed, and new ideas spread. Landholders face substantial changes in the form of rapid urbanization and migration, the collapse of commodity prices, conditions of persistent drought, the disappearance of party allies, the diminished value of caste, and an uptick in subaltern challenges. These changes give social movements a chance to perceive an opportunity for success while also shaping and affecting its ability to mobilize successfully against any subsequent countermovement. Ultimately, challengers and targets are both exposed to many of the same broader political, economic, and social-change processes. However, their social and economic positions shape their exposure to such changes. Incumbency often comes with significant advantages, especially in the form of key resources and mobilizing structures and institutions.
Individuals and groups everywhere feel compelled to make sense of how things are changing and how they should respond. For all of us this sense making is facilitated by, built upon, and drawn from an existing stock of cultural understandings and individual experiences and beliefs. These understandings, experiences, and beliefs are broadly held across distinct social strata, especially in societies punctuated by hierarchy and inequality. The powerful often possess a paternalistic ideology that is “propagated with an easy vehemence” (Jackman 1994, 8). In rural India, the divine hierarchy of the caste system continues to permeate broader social norms and doubtless serves as the implicit justification for the maintenance of the bonded-labor system. Indeed, it is unclear to upper-caste community members how landless untouchables will survive without care and attention. Or so the thinking goes. This concern for the laborer points up a second justification: the bonded-labor relationship is actually in the best interest of the bonded laborer. The landlord is willing to continue helping the bonded laborer for as long as the laborer needs it, ideally in perpetuity.
For generations, the dominant cultural ideologies of caste supported those rationalizations. When organized groups start pressing new claims in an increasingly favorable context, however, slaveholders are forced to offer justifications for their practices. These justifications themselves are not new, but movements force antagonists to speak them aloud. Such forced reflection can be problematic for the oppressor. Those vulnerable to losing power, authority, or resources are likely to view change as a threat. Their response is patterned and predicated on a combination of the resources available to them and their individual willingness to take certain sorts of action. Some oppressors respond to threats to their status with contentious or even violent attempts to reestablish the status quo and reinstate domination. Others are unwilling to do so and must make do with other responses.
Those with sufficient resources, and a lack of interest in persisting with the targeted behavior, may consider the entire affair to be an opportunity to shift out of an ailing sector or away from old behavior altogether—they may deploy their resources to quit or adapt rather than persist or repress. Those who perceive mobilization and broader change processes to be a threat will deploy their resources and select a tactic in order to engage the challenger.
What follows is an iterative process, as strategic interaction with the challenger provides the target with new information about whether they are able to afford the biases inherent in their original interpretive process. Those lacking resources and confidence may choose conciliatory tactics. Or they may choose confrontational tactics. In the end, it is the strategic interaction that provides the target with a better understanding of the real range of options available. This interactive approach is iterative and incremental, and it is fundamentally sensitive to an important explanatory factor: the gap between old opinions and new realizations.
A relational, iterative, and process-oriented model more clearly highlights the interactive nature of contestation, emphasizing the importance of incumbency’s lag effect, especially as the reality of the situation settles in and new interpretations are sought. Jasper and Poulsen demonstrate that targets create problems for themselves, which they then try to solve, if they are able. There are two assessments of the situation: the original interpretation and attribution and the subsequent reinterpretation and reattribution that follow contentious interaction with the challenger.
Original actions taken by targets may be blunt reactions to offense or shock. This flinch may be contrasted with the more studied and measured response that might follow once an individual or institution has taken stock of the situation in light of the new state of affairs. Reactionary tactics may be quite different from considered strategies. We may hypothesize that the gap between the first and second response is best anticipated by the extent of the target’s incumbency—in other words, the extent to which the target believed in the legitimacy of their own behavior.
Initially or ultimately, weak oppressors are left with nowhere to turn and resign themselves to the new state of affairs that movements have created through their recognition and utilization of new opportunities, the strategic use of resources, and new perspectives on old relations. Incumbent worldviews such as paternalism may be useful for sustaining inequality, but they are subject to erosion when the marginalized refuse to play by the rules of the game. As a strategy for maintaining inequality, paternalism works best when economic, cultural, and political forces favor the powerful. Former oppressors are thus left with fewer avenues of repression, since, in the final analysis, the overt use of power violates newly recognized rights and norms, albeit only at the community level. This is in clear contrast to the past, when this same behavior was mutually constitutive of dominant norms regarding the appropriate role of untouchable laborers. Appeals to paternalism ring hollow, and efforts to repress face new relational, normative, and practical challenges.
For social movement scholars, I hope this combination of familiar factors points to the relevance of iterative, relational, and process-oriented explanations of the way target-specific factors shape the emergence, evolution, and end of contestation. While considerably stylized, the following illustration connects each of the book’s key arguments sequentially, perhaps providing some testable hypotheses.
Status quo tactics are rooted in earlier settlements. The longer these settlements have been in place, the greater the likelihood they have become part of broader expectations. As a result, status quo tactics such as preemption are rooted in an original and earlier understanding of the way things should be. Whether we think of “earlier understanding” as a preexisting settlement, as false consciousness, or as the status quo, it is clear this broad set of assumptions gives rise to particular patterns of social and economic relationship and expectations for the same. In rural India, these relationships are patterned by the caste system. In other cases, the patterns will be different and follow different logics. The general point, however, is that the powerful usually know how to stay in power. Furthermore, this knowledge about how to stay in power may be recognized as a tactic, or it may be subsumed into a broader set of economic, social, and political arrangements that themselves forestall the emergence of grievances and action. These arrangements usually work so long as all other things are equal.
FIGURE 8.1 Three Stages: Culture/Politics/Agency
Sometimes all other things are not equal. In fact, broad and disruptive changes occurring in the social, political, economic, and cultural spheres undermine the very forums and processes that were used to maintain power. In other words, the consent of the governed (i.e., Lukes’s third face of power) is no longer the tool it once was. Furthermore, truly broad changes are visible to many social actors—individuals may suddenly realize they are part of a larger collective, and old collectives may realize the thing that unites them is under attack. Whether these changes are opportunities or threats is up for debate both on the street and in the halls of power.
Reactive tactics are adapted by challengers and incumbents alike (and by a host of other actors as well). For incumbents, who doubtless preferred the subtle and nonconfrontational tactics of the past, more obvious and forceful tactics must fill in. It is important to note that cooptation, countermobilization, and repression are never first-order choices: they are costly and to maintain power end up requiring both additional resources and increased effort. The goal of power’s third face is to make the possession of power appear effortless and a matter of fact. Through violent repression, the machinations of authority are revealed as just that: a machine rather than an ordained and divine source of authority. This is not the position the powerful would like to occupy, since it relies on direct and confrontational tactics, for example, countermobilization and repression, which emphasize crude and obvious sources of control and authority.
Direct and contentious interactions with insurgents provide incumbents with a reality check and an opportunity to reassess their situation. Tactical interactions put incumbents and insurgents in close contact. This provides targets an opportunity to go head to head with challengers but also to go head to head against reality, perhaps for the first time in a while. These are understandable reactions based on the prior status quo, and there is no way to properly predict exactly how incumbents will respond nor to predict whether they have the resources to do so, since the nature of the prior settlements varies from case to case. What we can be sure about is that decisions about the choice of tactics will be made with better and more recent data about the meaning of broader changes, the strength of incumbent resources, the support of other important elites like the state, and the desirability of alternatives. Joseph Luders (2010, 5), for example, suggests incumbents perform a cost-benefit analysis at this point and persist only if they can afford to do so.
1A considered strategy results from this process—tactical interaction with the challengers has allowed the incumbent to reevaluate and assess properly the exact scope of the changes. If they are minor, persistence is perhaps preferable. If they are significant, change may be inevitable. Incumbents have fewer options in the end: they generally persist in some way or quit altogether.
2I believe this approach takes seriously both structure (earlier settlements) and agency (the process of reassessment). Challengers and targets interact in complex ways and produce new environmental conditions. They simultaneously respond to and create reality. The case described here should go some way toward developing the more dynamic vocabulary necessary to describe target actions, as they calibrate and recalibrate and as they act and react, while also keeping an eye on the broader forces at work. Future scholarship will determine whether these factors are useful in other contexts. Future work may also take up a number of puzzles that this study has raised without resolving.
WHAT ROLE DOES THE MOVEMENT PLAY IN THE TARGET’S DECISION-MAKING PROCESS?
At the national level, Indian social movements have not been successful in framing bonded labor as an issue of mass mobilization or public outrage. Interviewees feel the ground is shifting beneath their feet, but this is the result of local challenges and national politics rather than a larger anti–bonded labor movement that has galvanized the general public. A sobering and unsurprising implication of this study is that movements may matter less than we would like to believe. The fact that interviewees in this study pointed so often to other factors and phenomena lends support to theorists like McAdam and Boudet (2012), who have called for more circumspect and rigorous assessments of when and where collective action emerges or fails to emerge.
SHOULD WE TAKE TARGETS AT THEIR WORD?
Targets also produce methodological puzzles. How might scholars best balance the lived experience of movement targets, who often perceive the deck is stacked against them, with the empirical reality of their elite status and their rights-violating behavior? Additionally, significant social movement case studies, such as the civil rights movement in the United States, benefited from a certain degree of hindsight. It is now clear that segregationists were on the wrong side of history. How do we weigh the testimony of rights violators when no such clarity is available to them or perhaps even to the scholar undertaking the study? How should we interpret incumbents’ perspectives in the midst of the action? Are those more or less insightful than data sampled later?
DO TARGETS CHOOSE TACTICS IN THE SAME WAY MOVEMENTS DO?
Incumbents choose tactics drawn from a particular repertoire. Beyond this general observation, little is known about how this process works. Turning back to an anecdote briefly noted in the second chapter, in a critical moment of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. made a deliberate move to march in Birmingham, Alabama, home to the segregationist city commissioner T. Eugene “Bull” Connor. Connor was both an avowed segregationist and a lawman. However, he allowed his personal commitments to segregation to cloud his professional judgment. At a time when a contemporaneous lawman, Laurie Pritchett, chose Ghandian tactics, Connor chose violence. King targeted Connor in the hope that he would choose to respond with repression. This is the very reason some antitrafficking groups choose to target extraordinarily violent oppressors: they make solid cases and set enduring precedents. High-profile legislation, law enforcement, and prosecution represent a particular set of movement tactics. We know that Connor consulted with Pritchett and that Pritchett emphasized his alternate approach. Connor then scrolled through a number of options and made his choice. We have history to thank for this anecdote, and it raises several provocative questions. How complex is the reasoning process in the reactive tactic stage? Do incumbents have a clear grasp on what tactics are available and preferable? If Connor consulted Pritchett, then why did he not heed the latter’s advice?
WHAT MAKES MOVEMENT VICTORIES SUSTAINABLE?
I have reported how interviewees tell me they feel and how they have responded to challenges. I have not, however, attempted to explain changes in attitudes and beliefs. More sophisticated and comprehensive studies will be needed to explore the relationship between changes in attitude and changes in behavior. How is it that some victories become the new status quo while others are fundamentally hollow, especially with regard to the underlying attitudes that underpin inequality? The Emancipation Proclamation was more aspirational than actual for much of the dark century that passed between 1865 and the Civil Rights Act. Efforts to answer such questions will contribute to both social movement studies as well as human rights scholarship.
HOW MIGHT WE BEST THINK ABOUT INCUMBENCY?
I have borrowed the term incumbency from Fligstein and McAdam, and I use it to explain delays and false starts among the powerful. Systems of authority may facilitate action but may also dull judgment, especially at critical junctures where the consequences of action are amplified. This concept has competition. The Brazilian educator Paolo Friere ([1970] 2000, 58) has argued that “oppressor consciousness” transforms “everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time—everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.” Friere echoes an earlier philosophy advanced by Martin Buber (1970), in which the latter argues that the othering and instrumentalization of humans is fundamentally dehumanizing. Where Friere argues that a mindset pervades a distinct and entire class, Buber suggests its potential exists more broadly within every individual.
3 Mary Jackman has argued that paternalism is a kind of false consciousness that hides the true nature of expropriative relationships. The culturally embedded nature of paternalism means that both the powerful and the powerless are generally unaware of its operations (Jackman 1994, 8).
A separate line of work has attempted to tackle this same puzzle from a different direction.
4 Scholarship on right-wing authoritarianism sketches a profile of individuals who believe that the world is dangerous and that in-group norms and values should be protected (Altemeyer 1996, Adorno et al. 1950). Likewise, efforts to specify an individually held social-dominance orientation have provided a measurement attuned to individuals who feel that the world is competitive and who respond more clearly to sociocultural factors, including resource scarcity and threats coming from economic competitors (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). Those scoring high on measures of right-wing authoritarianism value coercive social control, obedience, respect for authority, and conformity to religious norms, while those scoring high on social-dominance orientation tend to value power, achievement, and the ability to dominate the weak (Duckitt and Sibley 2009, 296).
I believe incumbency is preferable to these alternatives for a number of reasons. The first is the fact that incumbency is value neutral. While each of the terms appearing above may work well to describe a particular subset of a population, rights-violating behavior falls along a spectrum of social acceptability. Abusers are as likely to be norm followers as they are lawbreakers. Incumbency points to a position vis-à-vis challengers rather than a commitment to exclusion or oppression. Incumbency is defined by the fact that one has a thing or position that others desire. Theories of loss aversion have convincingly demonstrated that people will exert more energy to protect what they have than to gain something new (Tversky and Kahneman 1991). The implication is that most anyone will resist, when faced with the likelihood of losing the thing that a movement demands.
While it may seem like a consensus position that only someone with a right-wing authoritarian personality would resist emancipation efforts, this consensus position exists only in hindsight. The view from the right side of history distorts as much as it illuminates. Theories of authoritarianism and dominance do a very good job at describing support for conservative parties and movements. Yet social movements target incumbents of all psychological and political stripes, and anyone faced with losing something would like to keep it. This is not the domain of conservatives; it is a human condition.
IS INCUMBENCY A USEFUL CONCEPT IN OTHER SECTORS?
Corporate managers, large and small stockholders, and small sole proprietors are all affected quite differently. The sole proprietors I spoke with here are hardly the equivalent of the corporate decision makers captured by the business literature. But perhaps some of the lessons, especially related to the role of threats and resources, may be applied elsewhere. Groundbreaking work on social movement theory is happening in business schools, where collective-action approaches are being deployed to explain corporate behavior and to help businesses better understand both civil society and contentious politics. Future research may begin to fill the gap in knowledge between what is happening in the fields and farms of rural India and in the boardrooms and shareholder meetings of Fortune 500 companies. Are some larger principles at play, perhaps linking slaveholders’ and shareholders’ assessments of cost with that of politicians, whose responses to movement demands are moderated by public opinion, itself tied to anticipated voter behavior? Is incumbency a useful and portable concept that can serve comparative analysts across these sectors?
5WHAT DO INCUMBENTS TEACH US ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS?
With more data, a clearer and better-balanced perspective on slaveholders is emerging. Many facilitators are small-time criminals with a stake in only one piece of the trafficking enterprise. Others are economically marginalized sole proprietors in cases of bonded labor. This is not to deny there are large amounts of money involved in some forms of exploitation—trafficking for sexual exploitation is very lucrative. But there are many kinds of slavery and many different tasks and roles for those working to support this enterprise—not everyone is making large amounts of money in their particular role. All too often, slavery and trafficking rely on poor people to exploit even poorer people. Sending perpetrators to jail may help slow the problem, but addressing social and economic inequality will help stop it altogether.
Policies focused on economic growth, educational attainment, and infrastructural modernization are directly related to emancipation. As such, they should be considered antislavery projects. The slaveholders I spoke with were as likely to source their grievances to new roads and cheap mobile phones as they were to blame antislavery groups. I am certainly not the only one to observe that the first step to ending slavery is to address inequality head-on.
6 Yet scholars, activists, and policy makers often conceptualize inequality as something experienced by victims of slavery alone.
My observations are drawn from the Indian context, but studies in Cambodia, China, and the United States suggest poverty is a predictor for both midlevel perpetrators as well as victims.
7 Sustainable emancipation involves political, economic, and cultural power and participation for formerly enslaved individuals. It also requires addressing larger economic systems focused exclusively on profits, no matter the human cost.
CONCLUSION: THE LINE DIVIDING GOOD AND EVIL
Human rights violators are rarely monsters. Talking with current and former slaveholders helps us better understand the effects and outcomes of mobilization. This study provides a deeper understanding of how perceptions, resources, and options may galvanize action or break down resistance. Clearly, the dynamic would have been very different if these human rights groups were not mobilized, the broader circumstances were not changing, and effective counterframing to paternalistic rationales were neither voiced nor heard. The ideological justification of domination becomes a problem for oppressors when they are confronted by mobilized laborers in possession of alternative interpretations of the relationship and a broader range of options for pursuing their social, economic, and political goals. Movements matter, but so do the attributes of the incumbents they target.
To recognize that employers of bonded laborers are human beings and that the average brothel owner and trafficker is as likely to be a middle-aged woman working alone than a young man working with a syndicate is not to excuse exploitation but instead to open avenues for greater understanding of those community members responsible for exploitation and critical to sustainable emancipation (Sen and Nair 2005). Ward and Langlands’s (2008) assessment of restorative justice and human rights approaches to offenders emphasizes the importance of recognizing the human rights of victims, offenders, and their communities. Slaveholders, in this light, are “purposeful moral agents who have fundamental entitlements, as well as obligations, based on their inherent dignity as human beings” (Ward and Langlands 2008, 360). They are not, in a word, moral strangers (Ward and Birgden 2007).
John Conroy (2000, 121), reflecting on his handful of interviews with torturers, confesses that “some part of me hopes that the men I have interviewed are not representative of the whole, because for several of these men, I have a certain respect” for their willingness to speak candidly. Even more complicated, it seems, is the feeling that “in a few I could see myself.” I share this concern. Many of the men I interviewed had children the same age as my own, and others struck me as the classic beneficiaries of the kind of international-development programs that I tend to support the world over. But what do we make of ordinary men who are simultaneously recipients of development-aid programs as well as targets of movement-sponsored rights interventions?
In interview after interview I came away with the same sense as Conroy: “the worst part of these interviews was that they were not difficult…I never met the monster I anticipated” (2000, 122). Siddharth Kara (2012, 160) seems to find the same thing, as seen earlier—He was so ordinary—just a man, wearing simple village clothes. His aspect was common, his mustache trimmed, his hair neatly combed. He spoke without emotion. We were not expecting “family men…pillars of the local community.”
What were we expecting? The villain? The monster? We are often expecting pathological evil. Yet oppression is not pathological; it is instead embedded in broader cultural systems and legitimizing myths that render the horrible somehow normal and everyday and banal (Goldhagen [1996] 2007). Individuals hold their own opinions, but these individual opinions are part of larger cultural and social commitments to inequality (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). Coercion is seldom necessary when paternalism provides a relational patina for authoritarianism (Jackman 1994).
No wonder we fail to recognize the villain. Human rights violators themselves are a far cry from John Rawls’s polemical outburst: “What moves the evil man is the love of injustice: he delights in the impotence and humiliation of those subject to him and relishes being recognized by them as the author of their degradation” (Eagleton 2010, 94; Dews 2007). Perhaps rights violators in the agricultural sector, those holding bonded laborers in India, are different from those engaged in trafficking for sexual exploitation. Emerging scholarship on perpetrators of other forms of slavery suggests contemporary traffickers and slaveholders are not motivated by a love of injustice.
8 Instead, they are driven by cultural inertia, a desire for profit, or, more frequently, a need for basic sustenance. Perhaps we must “borrow the perspective of the perpetrators and view their evil not as the work of ‘lunatics,’ but as actions with a clear and justified purpose,” considering the broader political or cultural context (Waller 2007, 271). The threat, of course, is to our own conceptualizations of ourselves as moral actors and as humans.
Scholarship on evil takes us into conversations with Nazis and genocidaires but rarely into the homes and lives of less illustrious or notorious perpetrators. Yet, in neither of these places—the kilns of the Nazi ovens or the hearths of slaveholders—do we find a “love of injustice.” What we instead find are a thousand compromises and justifications. A thousand small steps and a few big leaps. A cultural milieu that facilitates the dehumanization of a particular group of individuals through some arbitrary trait, whether it be skin tone or touchability. What we find instead of the evil villains are husbands, fathers, mothers, and neighbors working with the cultural materials available to them, surviving as best they can with what resources they have, whether it be illiterate laborers or unwanted daughters. This is true for slavery and trafficking but also for other human rights violations more generally.
The implications are unsettling. Slovenka Drakulic, a Croatian journalist documenting Balkan war crimes trials in The Hague, writes that “as the days pass you find the criminals become increasingly human” (quoted in Smith 2011). “You watch their faces, ugly or pleasant, the way they yawn, take notes, scratch their heads or clean their nails, and you have to ask yourself: ‘what if this is a man?’” If rights violators are men and women, rather than monsters, then we must ask new sets of questions about our own selves, our own involvement in systems of exploitation and discrimination. Our distorted image of the villain disappears into a more prosaic and familiar set of tensions between old habits and new ideas—tensions we may recognize in our own lives. Movements to connect popular consumer goods or commodities to slavery at the source of production or extraction of natural resources have made great strides toward linking consumers to the lives of laborers. The foregrounding of these ethical links, however strained or tenuous, are important reminders of the ways our own patterns of consumption individually and desire for profit at a national and cultural level push unprotected workers into vulnerable pockets of the global economy. We should not be surprised when we meet rights violators and find ourselves facing a funhouse mirror in which bits of our own selves may be seen.
Of course, the terms used here—slavery and slaveholder—never crossed the lips—nor perhaps even the minds—of the men I spoke with. As we broke bread, drank tea, explored plantations and silk-production houses, swam in deep wells, climbed coconut trees, and talked late into countless evenings, the term slavery never came up. What came up, time after time, was respect, honor, and dignity. The sun was setting on their way of life for a thousand different reasons, and our conversations captured a sliver of their stories, shot through with pessimism and hope. Should we believe the stories of these men, human rights violators, criminals? In their own minds they play the leading roles as victims and heroes in turn.
The book’s implications are not limited to slavery, India, and emancipation. Incumbents’ paternalistic worldviews may help explain how certain cultural practices shape the way the powerful think about challenges to their authority in other contexts. Although bonded-labor practices are concentrated in South Asia, legitimizing myths that support exploitation and inequality know no borders and may be found in a host of other rights-violating practices.
Taking seriously the experience of rights violators will advance our understanding of how human rights policies and interventions succeed and why they fail. In so many ways, this is a moment in which we all find ourselves. In the interregnum between generations, eras, and epochs. In the moment we realize certain practices are no longer acceptable. The racist realizes old jokes no longer get laughs. The sexist realizes old moves no longer get attention. This book focuses on that very moment of realization and asks, what next? The answers, it turns out, tell us quite a bit about social change, social movements, human rights, and perhaps a bit about our own lives. Surely Solzhenitsyn was right: the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.