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” Contemporary Slavery: A Case of Mistaken Identity? ”. Paul Nugent Professor of Comparative African History/Director, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Ethan Kapstein:.
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”Contemporary Slavery: A Case of Mistaken Identity?” Paul Nugent Professor of Comparative African History/Director, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh
Ethan Kapstein: When most people think about slavery – if they think about it at all – they probably assume that it was eliminated during the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Slavery and global slave trade continue to thrive to this day; in fact, it is likely that more people are being trafficked across borders against their will than at any point in the past… Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger than absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century slave trade was
UN Office of Commissioner for Human Rights The word ‘slavery’ today covers a wide variety of human rights violations. In addition to traditional slavery and the slave trade, these abuses include the sale of children, child prostitution, child pornography, the exploitation of child labour, the sexual mutilation of female children, the use of children in armed conflicts, debt bondage, the traffic in persons and in the sale of human organs, the exploitation of prostitution, and certain practices under apartheid and colonial regimes
Four Features of Slavery • 1. Violence as the Founding Act (Claude Meillassoux) • 2. A Market Mechanism • 3. Slavery as Social Death (Orlando Patterson) • 4. Policing the Boundaries Between Slave and Free
1. Violence • 1. Child Soldiers (e.g. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda) • 2. Military Abductees (e.g. Dinkas by Baggara in Sudan) • 3. Abduction for Sexual Trafficking (e.g. China) • BUT: deception = violence?
2. Marketing of Slaves • 1. Transfer of Rights in People (Mauritania, Niger) • 2. Debt bondage and child labour (e.g. India, Pakistan, Nepal)
3. Slave as Non-Person • 1. Ideology of kinship as a mask for continuity of slave relations (e.g. Mauritania/Niger): naming, dress, work, living space • But: caste is not = slavery
4. Boundary Maintenance • Where are the Slaveholding Classes?: the Problem of Defining Trafficking as Slavery
Does the Terminological Confusion Really Matter? • A. The Narrative of New Slavery -Kevin Bales: • 1. “dramatic increase in world population world War II 2. “Modernization and the globalization of the world economy have shattered these traditional families and the small-scale subsistence farming that supported them 3. Corrupt elites
Does the Terminological Confusion Really Matter (2) • Getting tough on trafficking as the thin end of the wedge for migrants - need for a new discourse of human rights which asserts the fundamental right to mobility. Tighter controls merely mean higher economic rents for traffickers • Beware the new imperialism (remembering the hypocrisy of the old one)
Kapstein again • “To complement sanctions, Western states should also empower their police, intelligence and military force to act much more aggressively against those who traffic in humans. Just as force was ultimately needed to halt the slave trade in the nineteenth century, so will force be necessary in some cases today.”
