1. IN ALL ITS FORMS: SLAVERY AND ABOLITION, MOVEMENTS AND TARGETS
1. Interviewee 39. All names are pseudonyms.
2. This line of thinking leans on Kevin Bales’s (2004) early and provocative essay “Slavery and the Human Right to Evil,” in which he builds on Roy Baumeister’s notion of the “myth of pure evil.”
3. An important exception is d’Anjou (1996). For a historical perspective see Oldfield (1998, 2013), Stauffer (2001), McCarthy and Stauffer (2006), Duberman (1965), Perry and Fellman (1979), Blue (2005), Hahn (2005, part 1), Rugemer (2008), McDaniel (2013), Huzzey (2012), Harrold (1995), Delbanco (2012), and Sinha (2016).
4. The sociologist Verta Taylor (1989) has called such institutions
abeyance structures.
5. The notion of “private wrongs,” drawn from important work by Alison Brysk (2005), informs this entire study and lends a title to chapter 6.
6. Future work will doubtless build on the excellent work of political sociologists such as Kyoteru TsuTsui and political scientists such as Kathryn Sikkink, Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, Alison Brysk, and Emilie Hafner-Burton.
7. All interviews and focus groups were conducted through translation in either Kannada or Hindi (and occasionally in local dialects).
8. I have borrowed this leapfrog approach from Michael Lindsay’s (2008) fascinating study of the American evangelical elite.
9. According to the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (2012), the following are examples of the powers attaching to the right of ownership: buying, selling, or transferring of a person; using a person; managing the use of a person; profiting from the use of a person; transferring a person to an heir or successor; disposal, mistreatment, or neglect of a person.
10.
Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, and Zoran Vukovic, International Criminal Tribune for the former Yugoslavia, IT-96-23 and IT-96-23/1-A (2002).
11. This approach hews very closely to the argument developed by Kara (2012). Those skeptical of this approach to choice should be convinced that, choice aside, the inability to leave, pay down a debt, and live free of fear are certainly sufficient to determine that the individual has entered a condition of contemporary slavery. This problem has an analogy with human trafficking, where voluntary smuggling may be transformed, through threats, fraud, coercion, or the exploitation of a position of vulnerability, into human trafficking. This general argument has the support of the Indian Supreme Court, which has broadly, repeatedly, and as recently as 2010 defined “force” as “any factor which deprives a person of a choice of alternatives and compels him to adopt one particular course of action may properly be regarded as ‘force’ and if labour or service is compelled as a result of such ‘force,’ it would be ‘forced labour.’ Where a person is suffering from hunger or starvation, when he has no resources at all to fight disease or feed his wife and children or even to hide their nakedness, where utter grinding poverty has broken his back and reduced him to a state of helplessness and despair and where no other employment is available to alleviate the rigor of his poverty, he would have no choice but to accept any work that comes his way, even if the remuneration offered to him is less than the minimum wage. He would be in no position to bargain with the employer; he would have to accept what is offered to him. And in doing so he would be acting not as a free agent with a choice between alternatives but under the compulsion of economic circumstances and the labour or service provided by him would be clearly ‘forced labour.’” See Kara (2012), UN General Assembly (2000), and Supreme Court of India,
People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India and Others, Indlaw SC88 (Asiad Workers’ Case), (1982).
12. No such consensus exists in India, where slavery is often thought of as involving ownership and bonded labor as only involving control over labor but not the whole person. This book will not bridge that gap and will be undoubtedly be received differently in the West than on the subcontinent. I thank Kiran Kamal Prasad for this observation.
13. Subsequent scholarship may find that other frameworks do similar work in other cultural contexts.
2. BEST-LAID PLANS: A PARTIAL THEORY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT TARGETS
1. This chapter’s title riffs on Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough,” which merits quoting in part: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promis’d joy.”
2. See McAdam and Boudet (2012, 4–19) for an excellent overview of these eras.
3. For one account of this era, see Doug McAdam’s reflections in McAdam and Boudet (2012, 3–4).
4. My emphasis is on movement targets. Whether they are on the left or right makes little difference for my theoretical approach. It must be mentioned, however, that many studies to date have tended to focus on progressive movements for the expansion of rights and recognition for previously marginalized groups. Scholars have tended to spend less time in conversation with individuals from deeply unpopular groups, perhaps because they are dangerous or difficult to talk to. This may also be a reflection of our values, since we would often rather avoid studying groups we find objectionable (I thank Doug McAdams for this observation). There is some evidence that this narrow focus is starting to change. An important body of work has struck out in another fresh direction, focusing on conservative movements that have been traditionally overlooked by movement scholars. See Clifford (2012), McVeigh (1999, 2009), Van Dyke and Soule (2002), and Munson (2008). Movement theory is also being applied in fresh ways to corporate actors. See McDonnell and King (2013), Vasi and King (2012), Bartley and Child (2014), King and Soule (2007), and Soule (2009). In a similar vein, Kathleen Blee (2002) spent time talking to the women of the Ku Klux Klan, Kristin Luker (1984) has provided a sensitive portrait of the worldviews of pro-life and pro-choice activists, Ziad Munson (2008) took a long look at the making of pro-life activists, and Francesca Polletta (2006) edited a special issue of the journal
Mobilization focused specifically on the puzzle presented by “Awkward Movements.”
5. Gamson (1975, 14–15) helpfully defines a target of influence as “that set of individuals, groups, or social institutions that must alter their decisions or policies in order for a challenging group to correct a situation to which it objects. Such a target is the object of actual or planned influence attempts by the group, called here the group’s
antagonist.” He goes on to clarify that this term applies to corporations, national regimes, and actual office holders. These antagonists, Gamson argues, must be outside of the movement’s constituency (thereby excluding self-help groups and utopian communities). Gamson proceeds to introduce the “challenging groups” used to provide his seminal work on movement outcomes. No such introduction is made for the targeted groups.
Sidney Tarrow (2011, 165) defines social movements as “contentious collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities” (emphasis added). Tarrow follows this definition with an extended discussion of the first four factors—challenges, purpose, solidarity, interaction—but remains silent on the final, and arguably most critical, factor in the interaction: the movement’s target. None of these three terms—elite, opponent, authority—appear in the book’s index. Subsequent discussion suggests the importance of shifting political alignments, influential allies, and divided elites in enabling movements at those moments when “institutional access opens, rifts appear within elites, allies become available, and state capacity for repression declines.” The discussion of elite cleavages and allies, however, presents them as potentially enabling factors for the movement. The discussion is movement-centric, as if they are a simple binary variable: the broader context may or may not possess two key movement assets. It is only in the discussion of “shifting alignments” that we see elites in possession of their own verbs—political parties set out to engage movement actors in order to shore up support among a particular voting bloc.
In his entry to the comprehensive
Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Rucht (2004) suggests that “movements challenge external groups whom they perceive as opponents or adversaries, and vice versa.” Examples “range from other social movements (i.e., countermovements) to interest groups, corporations, churches, political parties, and public administrations to distinct political leaders.” This approach deserves mentioning on three accounts. To begin with, it does not actually set out to define targets as unique social actors, instead creating a movement-centric category. Second, this approach accounts for individuals and institutions but not more ideational and cultural movement targets. Finally, much to his credit, Rucht emphasizes the role perception plays in the process. Rights violators are many, yet movements make strategic targeting decisions and engage in selective framing efforts. Movements choose their targets. Additionally, targets also shape movements’ tactical repertoires, since the perceived defensive and offensive strength of a target provides movement actors with important information about what approaches are likely to work. Walker, Martin, and McCarthy (2008) refer to this as the “target’s vulnerabilities and its capacities for response.” Drawing on data from the
New York Times, Martin, McPhail, and McCarthy (2009) divide targets into public actors, such as the state or educational institutions, and private ones, such as businesses. This approach has the virtue of capturing both state and nonstate targets of violence while also incorporating persons and property into the equation.
Most recently, Fligstein and McAdam (2012) have framed these sets of relationships in terms of multiple fields of action in which incumbents and challengers compete and coordinate in various configurations. The focus on incumbents and challengers echoes those advanced by Gamson (1975) yet add an important variable: change. Competition and coordination ensure there is neither a fixed range of incumbents (e.g., only elites) nor a set band of challengers (e.g., only “the powerless”) but instead a constellation of challenges, alliances, and settlements.
Taken together, we have a sense that movements target novel configurations of individuals, groups, and institutions. The consensus definitions sketched above focus on individuals and institutions. This is good, but such definitions miss the critical role of norms, values, and ideas. Of course, a broad definition of “institution” includes the established range of ideas that guides social norms and behavior. Yet here I use the term to mean concrete social actors—perhaps the term “corporate” best differentiates this complex social actor from relatively less complex individual social actors.
Challengers set out to gain new rights and recognition at the individual and institutional level, but they also attack old or introduce new ideas. Elizabeth Armstrong and Mary Bernstein (2008) capture this perfectly in their assessment that movements challenge resources and rules. Symbolic struggles and expressive strategies have material implications, and claims for recognition or resources challenge social boundaries. Sit-ins simultaneously targeted lunch-counter proprietors, discriminatory business practices, discriminatory laws, and the Jim Crow system. Movements have many targets, and not all of them are individuals or institutions.
6. And where the subject is external to the challenger, thereby excluding self-help groups.
7.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “collective.”
8. Also see Taylor and Van Dyke (2004); Snow (2004); and Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni (1995).
9. But see Luders (2006).
10. More recently, see Maher (2010).
11. Joseph Luders (2010) advances an explicit theory of threat, which he operationalizes as the costs associated with disruption and concession. Movement scholars have identified a number of specific threats, including reputational threat (McDonnell and King 2013) and risk perception by managers (Vasi and King 2012).
12. Movements target institutions (Martin, McPhail, and McCarthy 2009), create new institutions (Andrews 2002), and aim beyond institutions (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008).
13. Joseph Luders (2010) has advanced an important explanation of target behavior but did so using case studies rather than interviews.
14. See, for example, Soule and Davenport (2009) and Beyerlein, Soule, and Martin (2015).
15. Activists often choose particular targets because they are expecting certain responses from them, since the target is seen as a means to an ultimate end. Some movement actions are intended to increase public awareness of their issue, rather than to secure a particular outcome. For this reason they may target an institution that is thought to be receptive to activists’ claims, rather than institutions known to be the worst offenders. Activists are often campaigning on two levels—the first focused on a particular policy or practice and the second focused more broadly on winning hearts and minds. Both targets and activists recognize that ultimately they must prevail in the battle for public opinion. Their tactical interplay—boycotts and buycotts, lobbying, and media campaigns, for example—are frequently stepping stones to greater impact on public opinion. (I thank Brayden King for this insight, which I have included here nearly verbatim from personal communication.) See King and McDonnell (2015).
16. While my theoretical take here owes much to Doug McAdam, this agent- (or player-) and process-oriented approach has emerged out of conversations with Jim Jasper. Needless to say, the hiccups, ghosts, and glitches can be claimed by myself alone.
17. In this study I have focused on individual-level incumbents rather than on incumbent institutions or ideas. This simplifies things considerably, as it is easier to track single unified actors as they respond to movement efforts and broader changes.
18. Three decades of scholarship have confirmed the importance of grievances, resources, opportunities, and cultural frames for the mobilization of individuals and our understanding of movements’ impacts (see Tarrow 2011). Newer lines of thinking have emphasized the fact that these struggles take place within broader contexts—variously conceptualized as fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2012) or arenas (Jasper and Duyvendak 2014)—in which movement targets might themselves be organized in collective-action struggles targeting other centers of authority with their own claims. These approaches have the advantage of better situating any particular context or set of actors in motion and within a dynamic space. What remains to be seen is how these explanations might be best deployed by a new generation of scholars. See, for example, King and Walker (2014).
The staying power of the political-process approach is perhaps best explained by its amenability to empirical studies. Newer explanations drawing on fields and arenas have added important nuance to our models. This nuance has not necessarily resulted in a clearer research agenda for scholars conducting the practical studies that represent the bread and butter of social movement scholarship. While general and midrange theories are considered passé in sociology, the political-process approach offers important tools for explaining movement emergence and anticipating dynamic interactions between actors. To be clear, it is not my goal to recover a static and structuralist account of state-challenger interactions. Rather, my objective is to emphasize the enduring importance of these key movement factors for both challengers and incumbents.
19. A focus on costs in this light stretch back to James Wilson’s (1961) focus on “negative inducements” and Bill Gamson’s (1990) emphasis on “constraints,” though they are now more familiar as threats, thanks to the pioneering and enduring work of Charles Tilly. This helpful genealogy is but one of several gems in Luders’s (2010, 3n3) work.
20. Whether a particular situation is “really” an opportunity or threat is not a debate I will rehash here. Those interested are advised to begin with the debate over false consciousness that followed Steven Lukes’s ([1974] 2005) seminal work on power as well as with contemporary critiques of the “political opportunity” approach (see Goodwin and Jasper 1999).
21. Indeed, Gamson (1975) calls this “pre-emption.”
22. Luders, for example, demonstrates that lunch-counter operators were unsure whether integration would cause white customers to shop and conduct business elsewhere. When white customers indicated they would continue frequenting integrated businesses, business owners reassessed the threat. I thank Joseph Luders for directing my attention to this fact in personal correspondence.
23. The political-process model, as advanced by McAdam and coauthors, recognizes the fact that both parties reassess their situations (see, for example, in Fligstein and McAdam 2012, fig. 1).
24. I thank Aidan McQuade for this cogent observation.
25. This definition diverges from that provided by Gamson (1975, 29): new advantages without acceptance. The reason for this is that I use the term to describe incumbent strategies prior to the emergence of collective action. Preemption is a strategic effort to forestall the emergence of collective action in the first place, rather than a tactical attempt to halt mobilization. Much work is done to prevent the emergence of grievances and a sense that something could be done about those grievances. Of course, targets may respond to collective action with new advantages without acceptance, but I considered these responses to be a form of adaptation and persistence.
26. My use of this term generally follows the definition laid out by Gamson (1990, 29): “acceptance without new advantage,” though with some clear exceptions. In some cases confrontational countermobilization efforts head off mobilization. In other cases, a strategy of co-optation attempts to reshuffle the deck by, for example, installing a low-caste proxy in an elected position.
27. Andrews (2002, 2004) observes that the tactical interaction between movement and countermovement represents more of a “loosely coupled tango” than anything else.
28. I am thankful to Joseph Luders for this observation.
29. Myra Marx Ferree (2004, 88) calls such actions “soft repression,” and Jennifer Earl (2003, 50) refers to them as “observed and unobserved coercive repression by private agents.”
30. Here an important alternate explanation deserves mentioning. It may be that a movement target is commitment to social dominance over the targeted population. Jim Sidanius and colleagues (Sidanius, Pratto, Laar, and Levin 2004) argue that a “social dominance orientation” is rooted in three forms of stratification—gender, age, and an arbitrary, culturally specific third distinction. Sidanius and Pratto (1999) suggest commitment to legitimizing myths aggregate socially and are held individually in the form of a “social dominance orientation”—a desire for group-based dominance. Sidanius and Pratto’s theory of social dominance is strengthened by the recognition that this orientation (SDO) is unevenly distributed socially and has varying effects on members of society. While Sidanius and Pratto offer survey-based instruments for measuring SDO, my sense is that commitments to inequality are difficult to measure, especially when the topics under consideration are in the process of being politicized through a social-movement intervention. Also see Pratto, Tatar, and Conway-Lanz (1999).
31. But emotions only carry the day if they can be sustained through critical resources like collective identity and solidarity or organizational capacity.
32. Indeed, qualitative evidence from this study suggests multiple instances in which perpetrators were both unwilling to quit and unable to persist. It is likely the segregationist Bull Connor fit into this category, as we have no indication that it was anything other than federal intervention that forced his hand and ended his anti-integration efforts. Resistance may emerge, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam (2012, 105) argue, when a target’s “power and material advantage is fully dependent on the existing settlement, thus motivating them to fight to the bitter end to preserve their privileged position.” The target’s motive to resist may be clear, but the ability to persist is uneven. Some targets are able to persist but remain unwilling to do so. Why might this be?
While I am unable to confirm my hypothesis with the data on hand, I believe the answer lies in variation in the attribution of opportunity (or of threat): Individuals may perceive new opportunities within the broader social and economic transformations that can be secured with sufficient capital. To borrow a reference from popular culture, when combined with sufficient resources, “chaos is a ladder” (Murrow 2013)—movements may provide cover for institutions and individuals to take otherwise unpopular or risky action. Likewise, perceptions of threat are just as likely to drive action, as when a stockbroker sells stock in a beleaguered company or fund. If an investment—in a company targeted by a divestment campaign or a social practice targeted by an education campaign—looks more risky than rewarding, then there is good reason to believe that a rational actor would walk away. It delights me to note a second, ultimately improvable, explanation. It may be that slaveholders in this study see the error of their ways and have a “change of heart,” essentially experiencing what Doug McAdam termed cognitive liberation. Certainly there is some recourse for those who “have so internalized the self-serving account of their own advantage that they are blind to other perspectives” (Fligstein and McAdam 2012, 105). I believe some blindness can be cured, including bigotry and racism, though this tends to be an exception, and though this hypothesis is ultimately beyond empirical assessment.
33. I thank Doug McAdam for this observation, which I have included here nearly verbatim from personal communication.
34. There is a small but growing body of literature on this topic, however. See Conroy (2000), Dews (2007), Hatzfeld (2005), Meister (2011), Smith (2011), and Waller (2007).
35. I thank Joseph Luders for pushing me to recognize better the fact that these economically rooted vulnerabilities often make certain targets more vulnerable “irrespective of cultural circumstances” (personal correspondence, March 2016).
3. JUST LIKE FAMILY: SLAVEHOLDERS ON SLAVERY
3. Arguably, it was his brother who forced him to take the debt in the first place and later to shift out of the debt and into the promise of rehabilitation funds.
4. Founder of The Federation. As my colleague Farheen Husain has pointed out, people enter into bonded conditions to mitigate hardship, but sometimes also in order to gain protection against former abusing slaveholder and thereby avoid future entrapment.
19. The intimacy of paternalism is perhaps the most insidious form of the third face of power advanced by Lukes ([1974] 2005) and Gaventa (1982).
22. An example of this can be seen in the notion of Varnas, that each caste has a sociospiritual role in the divine order. For a range of perspectives on this topic, see Bentley and Stedman Jones (2001), Cohen (2010), King (1901), and Pelczar (1993).
4. AS IF WE ARE EQUAL: SLAVEHOLDERS ON EMANCIPATION
1. All quotes in this paragraph are from interviewee 31.
5. Colossians 3:23: “Let your hearts be in your work, as a thing done for the Lord and not for men.”
11. See, for example, David Simon’s
The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008).
12. Interviewee 107 and 97, respectively. Interviewee 97 argued: “Some people don’t repay their debts. People who command respect return the money. But those who don’t command respect don’t repay their debts.”
14. Helpfully, the monsoon season (Kharif crops) coincides with the work season offered by MNREGA. This allows laborers to leverage MNREGA work for higher wages.
15. Focus Group Discussion 45.
17. I thank Farheen Husain for this observation.
21. Scheduled Tribe / Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Castes, respectively.
23. Focus group participant, Focus Group Discussion 45.
32. The reality is that many rural laborers cycle through urban labor markets and engage in dirty, dangerous, and difficult work, often exposed to trafficking networks and reexploitation in India’s new urban economy. It stands to reason that farmers experience labor constraints because of human trafficking, which represents an exploitative subset of this outbound migration. Demand for labor is high in urban areas, and laborers are perhaps more likely to be convinced by the promises of traffickers.
5. THE FARMER IN THE MIDDLE: TARGET RESPONSE TO THREATS
2. I thank Farheen Husain for emphasizing to me the actual
and symbolic power inherent in this position.
3. This particular formulation has been borrowed, verbatim, from personal correspondence with Joseph Luders (March 2016).
4. In the discussion that follows I address each category except “preemption,” which is discussed more appropriately in chapter 3.
7. Movement groups often respond to consistent repression or countermobilization with a shift in tactics from community mobilization to police-coordinated raids. This has the effect of removing willful criminals from our sample by placing them in jail. Interviews with victims of these more hostile, violent, and criminal employers suggests a consistency in the findings, however.
8. Focus Group Discussion 155.
9. Such officials would include the district magistrate and the subdistrict magistrate.
10. Focus Group Discussion 148. Interviewee 155 underscores this fact with the observation that, since police are transferred so regularly, it is difficult to know whom one can trust.
11. Focus Group Discussion 153.
12. Interviewee 69, founder of Mobilizing for Change.
16. Though such an exploration would be difficult, as it would require securing interviews with a community that has been more seriously stigmatized than the interviewees for this project.
27. Interviewee 122 and Focus Group Discussion 45. Focus Group Discussion 45: “Only those people are doing farming who are fifty or sixty years old. Those younger are not. There are some who didn’t get a job anywhere. Their parents have a farm at home. They are doing it out of necessity.”
29. Interviewee 42, Mobilizing for Change.
30. Interviewee, leader of the Anti-Trafficking Initiative.
31. Interviewee 76, founder of Free from Bondage.
39. Thucydides’ summary of the Athenians’ statements to the Melians is worth quoting in full: “We hope that you…will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (
History of the Peloponnesian War 5.5.89).
40. Focus Group Discussion 45.
42. Also see Ruef and Fletcher (2003).
46. A further advantage to this arrangement is that the legal owner who obtains the sales permit from the state revenue offices may live in an urban area and outsource ongoing operations to a chain of contractors. Accountability is greatly obscured in the process. I thank Farheen Husain for pointing this out.
49. Interviewee 76, founder of Free from Bondage.
50. See also King and Pearce (2010) as well as King and Walker (2014).
6. PRIVATE WRONGS: SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
1. Though Kara (2012) estimates more. Some estimates run significantly higher. The Bonded Labor Liberation Front (2013) suggests that the number is 65 million children and 300 million adults, or one-third of India’s total population.
2. Hueze (2009, 168) argues that “debt appears as the point which associates the spirit of Hindu culture to capitalism and monetized social relations.”
3. See Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, Act no. 19 of 1976, February 9, 1976, Indian Ministry of Labour and Employment.
4. According to the UN’s 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, debt bondage is “the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal service or those of a person under his control as a security for a debt, if the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied toward the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined.” The ILO (2001) defines bonded labor as a “term [that] refers to a worker who renders service under conditions of bondage arising from economic considerations, notably indebtedness through a loan or advance.”
5. Data from the Planning Commission’s report stops in 2007. See Government of India Planning Commission (2012).
6. Indeed, one possible reason the ILO’s 2005 estimates of forced labor were so much lower (12 million) than other estimates was rumored to be the fact that India did not cooperate with the study’s request for estimates.
7. Based on 2005 exchange rates from xe.com. $400/month × 12 months = $4,800. According to Forbes.com, middle class was $4,000 or more at the time of writing.
8. See Carpenter (2015), Picarelli (2015), Iacono (2014), Siegel and Blank (2010), Troshynski and Blank (2008), and Goodey (2008).
9. This finding echoes George Lakoff’s (2010). I am grateful to Lars Almquist for this observation.
10. The notion of a “welfare queen,” for example, is a particularly pernicious myth that legitimizes disdain for the working poor in the United States.
11. Dalit is the term I prefer to use for a group once described as “untouchable,” described by Gandhi as the Harijan (“children of god”), and officially recognized by the Indian government as the “Scheduled Caste.” Caste discrimination continues despite having been abolished by the Constitution and addressed by numerous laws over the intervening decades. See Macwan et al. (2010).
12. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a national political party with center-left leanings. It draws the majority of its support from the populous state of Uttar Pradesh. The party’s focus on
bahujan (literally, the majority) takes its inspiration from B. R. Ambedkar, the author of the Indian Constitution.
13. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or “India’s People’s Party,” is a conservative national political party that promotes Hindu nationalism.
14. Mawdsley’s sentiment echoes the work of scholars such as Pavan Varma (2007, 136), who writes that “if we seek to catalogue the dominant social traits of the middle class, the first thing that comes to mind is a truly amazing imperviousness to the external milieu except in matters that impinge on its own immediate interest,” as well as Andre Beteille (1991) who contends the “expanding middle class has an ugly face, and its members often appear as callous and self-serving.” Also see Roy (1993), Deo and McDuie-Ra (2011), and Mawdsley (2004, 88).
7. LONG GOODBYE: THE CONTEMPORARY ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT
1. This chapter touches on themes articulated in the
Journal of Human Rights and in a recent edited volume. See Choi-Fitzpatrick (2015a, 2016b).
2. Weitzer (2014) writes: “From 2001 to 2011, the U.S. government alone spent a reported $1.12 billion funding international and domestic antitrafficking programs (Don’t Shout Too Loud, documentary, Changing Directions Productions, 2013).”
3. Here I must make an observation about the Western-centric nature of this exercise. In what follows I trace the history and debates as they have occurred within the United States and Britain. There are two reasons for this. The first is lamentable: I am less familiar with other contexts, languages, and histories. The second reason is advantageous: the social movements described here represent the world’s
first transnational advocacy effort, antislavery is the world’s
longest-running series of loosely linked movements, and in its current form the debates occupying the Anglo-American sphere have the
most significant impact on international law and norms, representing nearly all of the private- and public-sector funding that goes toward eradicating slavery. Hundreds of millions of dollars in spending is effected by the logics and debates detailed in this chapter. For this reason alone these predominantly Anglo-American debates matter for policies, private and public expenditure, and grassroots emancipation efforts. It is my hope that this initial effort is followed by other studies that illuminate those areas I have not.
4. The concept of “four antislavery waves” can be traced to arguments advanced by Kevin Bales. See Bales and Cornell (2008).
5. I thank Kevin Bales for this observation.
6. I would propose the addition of a third, smaller, yet salient phase in the English-speaking world. With a peak period from 1870 to 1914, both the United States and Britain experienced widespread concern over the “White Slave Trade,” a panic that used the rhetoric and imagery of slavery to advocate for the protection of female chastity, peaking in the United States with the passage of the Mann Act (see Bell 1910, Day 2010). This initiative is increasingly factored into the literature as part of abolitionist history. While its inclusion is sometimes contested given its patriarchal conceptualizations of gender, it is important to emphasize because it laid the groundwork for much of the language of rescue and rehabilitation that became common in the late 1990s (see Bernstein 2010) and is still occasionally used both legally (see Mattar 2011) as well as by movement actors (see Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014, Quirk 2007).
7. See Bales (2012) for a classic overview of this story.
9. This overview draws on ideas first advanced in Choi-Fitzpatrick (2016a).
10. See, for example, the entire special issue of the
Journal of Human Trafficking: Feasley (2016), Denton (2016), Arhin (2016), and Gotch (2016). See also Carpenter (2015).
11. Quickly scanning the literature it is clear that recent studies have drawn from a number of sources, including socially acceptable crimes (this volume), trusted diaspora networks (Zhang 2008, 2013; Arhin 2016), data from criminal trials (Denton 2016, “Anatomy of Offending”), and data from arrestees (see Keo et al. 2014).
12. See the special issue of the
Journal of Human Trafficking (2016), guest edited by Choi-Fitzpatrick.
13. Here I follow a division between “abolitionist abolitionists” and “risk-reduction abolitionists” articulated in Choi-Fitzpatrick (2015a).
14. In other words, vulnerability might be rooted in a lack of state protection or in systems of patriarchy, gender oppression, and the male right to sex. See Gallagher (2012).
15. See the 2014 special issue of the
Anti-Trafficking Review on “Following the Money: Spending on Anti-Trafficking.”
16. But see Appiah (2011) and Bunzl (2011) for an analysis of a recent wave of redemptions.
17. I have Aidan McQuade to thank for this observation.
19. In the late 1990s the CIA estimated that as many as 50,000 individuals were trafficked into the United States every year, yet by the late 2000s the official U.S. government estimate had settled to 14,500 per year—the truth is, nobody knew. Not to be dissuaded, entrepreneurial grant recipients, committed to the cause and facing the loss of funding if funding was cut based on a lack of identified victims, rebranded prostitution as “domestic trafficking” and effectively reinflated this number. This heuristic move had the effect of bringing a much larger and more familiar community of sex workers under the trafficking umbrella and onto the agenda of local law enforcement. I believe this shift was born of a desire to maintain funding but had the effect of further cementing a perspective that prostitution is slavery. Note: the United States government is largely out of the estimation business now; for an ongoing effort to estimate slavery’s global scope, see the Global Slavery Index.
20. I am thinking of Bales and Hathaway in particular here. See Hathaway (2008).
21. This broader contemporary-slavery perspective is advanced in various ways by a number of scholars generally rooted in comparative and historical sociology. Kevin Bales’s popular work (2012) was subtitled “New Slavery,” and he specifically delineated the relationship between “new” and “old” slavery. The exercise, however, was intended to emphasize that while the unimportant things had changed (legal ownership, for example), the truly important things (like control) had not. While some scholars are skeptical of this dichotomy, this skepticism is rooted in a sense that significant amounts of slavery persisted between 1865 and 1989—in other words, the issue is important, but it isn’t new. Important work by both Joel Quirk (2011) and Suzanne Miers (2003) has shed critical light on the persistence of slavery in postabolition contexts throughout the twentieth century.
Siddharth Kara’s (2011) investigation of bonded labor in India follows the same logic. By identifying bonded labor as a form of slavery, and in emphasizing that this form of slavery is quite old, this research further undermines the notion that the problem is predominantly one of the globalization-induced trafficking of women. The slavery perspective has an older legal heritage than competing perspectives. This is true in terms of both domestic legislation (which stretches back to the Slave Trade Act of 1807 in Britain) and international law (the 1926 Slavery Convention). The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery extend the 1926 Slavery Convention’s determination that “slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised” to include debt bondage in those cases where there is control over a person tantamount to possession. In sum, the argument here is that “slavery” is a category that covers the movement of people into enslavement (trafficking) quite well.
22. Over the past decade critiques of the existing human rights model (Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women [GAATW] 2007, Gallagher 2009, Hathaway 2008) have grown in number and hopefully in sophistication, as have pieces of new thinking about what a better model might look like (Bales and Choi-Fitzpatrick 2012, Brysk and Choi-Fitzpatrick 2012a, Gallagher 2009). Groundwork for this approach has been laid in works by a number of scholars, including Bales (2012), Brysk (2005), Brysk and Choi-Fitzpatrick (2012a), Bales and Choi-Fitzpatrick (2012), and Gallagher (2009), as well as by a range of human rights groups, especially the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW). See also Kempadoo (2005) as well as Kempadoo and Doezema (1998). For a critical perspective see Quirk and Bunting (forthcoming).
8. BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL: THE EVERYDAY ETHICS OF RESOURCES AND REAPPRAISAL
1. That is to say, if concession costs are high and disruption costs are low.
2. One particular outcome that I have overlooked—ignored altogether actually—is a complete change of heart and change of mind among incumbents. While this is certainly possible, I believe that more often than not social change can be explained not by the transformation of the mind but by simple resignation and quitting. Future research may demonstrate that this is in fact an inverted U, with incumbents possessing the most and fewest options the most likely to mobilize themselves through last-ditch collective-action strategies intended to reclaim power and authority. I believe this is a probable pattern, although not one testable from the data at hand.
3. This is an important distinction. What Friere roots in personal consciousness I have located instead within culture, since the absolutely pervasive nature of oppression leads me to believe the causal mechanism is norm following rather than an individual preference for inequality. See Noelle-Neumann (1974).
4. The following discussion echoes the argument made by John Duckitt and Chris Sibley (2009) in their excellent chapter on the topic.
5. This line of thinking can be found in the work of Paul Burstein ([1985] 1998).
6. See Bales (2007) and a truncated version of this argument in Bales and Choi-Fitzpatrick (2012).
7. On Cambodia, see Keo et al. (2014); on China, see Shen (2016); and on the United States, see Carpenter (2015).
8. See, for example, Feasley (2016), Denton (2016), Shen (2016), Arhin (2016), and Gotch (2016).