“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”: A critical analysis of international slavery agreements and concepts of slavery

Conclusion  No international agreement has been completely effective in reducing slavery. This stems in part from the evolution of slavery agreements and the inclination on the part of the authors of conventions to include other practices as part of the slavery defintion, resulting in a confusion of the practices and definitions of slavery. What has been missing is a classification that is dynamic and yet sufficiently universal to identify slavery no matter how it evolves. We have attempted to build on theories and examples to clarify the identification of slavery by focusing on an irreducible core of three elements. Assessing the presence of all three can then be applied to a variety of social relationships: first, the complete control of one personal by another; second, appropriation of labor power; and third, the enforcement of these conditoins by threats or acts of violence. Many practices identified in international agreements have some but not all of these three aspects; all three are present in traditional forms of slavery, bonded labor, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery. Effective research and legislation against slavery is important, as it affects an estimated 27 million people worldwide, and as slavery is on the increase now that many developing countries are forced to compete for income in a global economy. Finally it is important to remember that slavery, like all social and economic relationships, evolves over time. Any definition that is based on a historical form of slavery will soon lose its power to capture new forms of slavery within its aegis. Our understanding and our definition of slavery must become as dynamic as the phenomenon itself. This article draws upon a report made to the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, prepared by Anti_Slavery International and Professor David Weisbrodt. (See Report of the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery on Its Twenty-Third Session, UN Doc./E/CN.4/Sub.2/1988/14, para. 22 (1998). Michael Dottrigher Director of Anti-Slavery International, was a lead author of that report. Norah Gallagher also provided important research, along with Matthew Armbrecht, Marcela Kostihova, and Mary Thacker. Production of the report was supported in part by Kevin Bales. Caroline Tendall aided the editing of this article.     

Modern slavery: A literature review using bibliometric analysis and the nexus of governance

This article reviews and analyses the empirical and theoretical literature on modern slavery, a topic that has received substantial attention in recent years. A qualitative and quantitative meta-literature review was carried out on modern slavery literature published between 1999 and 2021. A total of 280 works on the topic were analysed using citation analysis (Harzing's Publish or Perish and VOSviewer software) and content analysis. Several noteworthy aspects in the literature were identified, specifically the topics, articles, authors, journals, institutions, countries, co-authorship networks, and research streams. The research streams fall into three categories: 1) an overview and growth of modern slavery, 2) modern slavery and theories, and 3) modern slavery and country behaviour. The review and analyses led to the development of 15 research questions for future research. In addition, two views about current research on modern slavery were established: 1) the assertion that modern slavery is not exclusive to specific nations, jurisdictions, or periods, and 2) despite the numerous areas of accounting research on modern slavery, there is still a lack of studies on the topic. This study is the first to use inclusive mapping to empirically evaluate modern slavery.     

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

This special issue of Citizenship Studies brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, bodies and slavery into collision, we highlight the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which, as Paddy McQueen below puts it, ‘citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both’. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity (as developed in the work of Engin Isin), bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This introduction connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied. Taking embodied relationality into account, recognising the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.     

Is Trafficking Slavery? Anti-Slavery International in the Twenty-first Century

Why was Anti-Slavery International (ASI) so effective at changing norms slavery and even mobilizing the support that ended the transatlantic slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century, and why has that success not continued on into subsequent eras? This article claims that ASI's organizational structure is the key to understanding why its accomplishments in earlier eras have yet to be replicated, and why today it struggles to make modern forms of slavery, such as human trafficking, salient political issues. Organizational structure is defined by how an NGO distributes power over agenda-setting (proposal and enforcement power) and its implementation. Those NGOs that centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda will be most effective at changing international norms. This paper demonstrates the tractability of that claim with a comparative analysis of ASI past and present to show that changes in organizational structure have led to differences in their effect on international norms, in spite of the fact that slavery in its modern forms persists as a political and social problem.     

Voting on slavery at the Constitutional Convention

This paper provides the first empirical study of delegate voting behavior on issues of slavery at the U.S. Constitutional Convention. We analyze two categories of votes: those related to apportionment and those related to the regulation of the slave trade. Although it is widely believed that delegates voted consistent with the interests of their states on issues of slavery, we find that for votes on apportionment, the effect of state interests was enhanced by both the delegate’s personal interest and his religious background. For votes regulating the slave trade, state interests had a significant effect but only within specific regions.     

Let's go outside: bodies,prostitutes, slaves and worker citizens

In liberal thought, slavery is imagined as reducing the human being to nothing but a body, while the free and equal political subjects of modern liberal democracies are held to be abstract, universal and disembodied individuals. In theory, bodies are also unimportant in the wage labour exchange. Though traditional models of worker citizenship insist on state and employers' duty to protect the human worth of worker citizens, they also assume the disembodied, thing-like nature of commodified labour power. Because bodies are so obviously important in the exchange between prostitute and customer, sex work is difficult to reconcile with liberal fictions of disembodiment, and one strand of feminist debate on prostitution is preoccupied by the question of whether prostitutes are like slaves or wage labourers. Protagonists on both sides of this debate often reproduce liberal understandings of labour power as a ‘thing’ that can be detached from the person. And yet labour power is also a contested commodity, and wage labour has historically been likened to slavery by activists struggling against the commodification of labour power. This article argues that stepping outside liberal fictions of disembodiment and recognising the parallels between prostitution, wage labour and slavery would allow greater scope for establishing a common political subjectivity amongst prostitutes, other wage workers and all those who have an interest in halting and reversing the current global trend towards the commodification of everything. In this way, common political ground between prostitutes and other wage workers is more visible when we step outside liberal assumptions about embodiment, slavery, work and citizenship.     

UDHR and Modern Slavery: Exploring the Challenges of Fulfilling the Universal Promise to End Slavery in All Its Forms

This article reflects on the prohibition of slavery set out in article 4 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and analyses efforts undertaken in the years since to fulfil this commitment. It first addresses the evolution in the prohibition from historic forms of slavery to contemporary forms of slavery and human trafficking. Second, the article examines the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the National Referral Mechanism to appreciate the UK's efforts to implement various international commitments to prohibit slavery, noting that the current focus towards criminalisation and the meagre support offered as victim protection does not constitute a sufficiently comprehensive strategy towards effective prohibition. Third, areas for reform are identified that could reorient government strategy toward more effective victim protection and support, starting with better identification of victims. And finally, the article argues in favour of actions that seek to prevent modern slavery crimes and abuse, including with a more robust regulatory framework that engages private sector actors to recognise the risks of slavery and exclude forced labour from supply chains.     

An African American Welfare State

Histories of the American welfare state have been white histories, in part because scholars have presumed that welfare state institutions are benevolent and exist to assist those in need. But if we take seriously work that instead focuses upon the degree to which welfare state regimes affect citizens' freedom to survive apart from dependence on the labor market or upon a male breadwinner, along with scholarship that highlights the malign functions of relief, then explicitly repressive institutions become legitimately within the purview of welfare state analysis. This article makes the formative case that slavery, Jim Crow, and the prison might be considered welfare state institutions, given their impact upon the material well-being of so many Americans. Because these institutions have most affected blacks, we might have reason to distinguish between a white welfare state and an African American welfare state, and reject the notion that we can coherently speak of the welfare state.     

Reconsidering the Great Compromise at the Federal Convention of 1787: Deliberation and Agenda Effects on the Senate and Slavery

Conventional accounts of the Federal Convention of 1787 point to the many different compromises made at the convention, specifically the Great Compromise on representation and the Three‐Fifths Compromise on slavery. Often these compromises are treated as separate events, the result of deliberation leading to moderation of delegate positions (presumably among the key states of Massachusetts and North Carolina). However, by applying the techniques of roll‐call analysis, we find this traditional account is at best incomplete and probably misleading. While the Massachusetts delegation's behavior seems consistent with a moderation hypothesis, we find evidence that the other crucial vote for the Great Compromise—from North Carolina—is inconsistent with moderation, but can be linked through the agenda to the Three‐Fifths Compromise over slavery, taxation, and representation. We conclude by arguing that this reconsideration of some of the convention's key votes should cause political scientists and historians to reevaluate how they see the compromises at the convention.     

Erik Gustaf Geijer’s “On Slavery” (1845)

This article is a translation of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s article on slavery, published in Stockholm in 1845. Geijer writes: “Such was the world in which Christianity made its appearance with its doctrine: that all human beings were God’s children...” Of North America, he writes: “And on that soil the final battle of slavery and freedom within the Christian world is also likely to be fought.”     

Slavery: a dual-equilibrium model with some historical examples

What sustains slavery, and why at critical junctures—the fall of the Roman Empire, the early modern expansion of plantation agriculture, the later phases of the industrial revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s—has it often expanded or contracted so rapidly? Why have elites sometimes been united, but sometimes violently divided, over the choice between free and servile labor? Why has slavery usually been ended by legal prohibition rather than voluntary abandonment? An extremely simple dual-equilibrium picture can illuminate how, when, and with whose support slavery is introduced or abolished. Internal divisions over slavery are likely to be most intense as a society approaches either of these “tipping points.” The most striking example, explored fleetingly here, is the US Civil War.     

'The Form Most Eligible': Liberty in the Constitutional Convention

Although the framers of the U.S. Constitution agreed that thefirst principles stated by the Declaration of Independence werefundamental, they thought that the form which freedom shouldtake within the Constitution could not be discovered by a resortto natural rights (and thus declined to affix a bill of rightsto the Constitution). They rejected both the view that libertyis independence (whether of individuals or of states) and theview that liberty is equivalent to the rule of the people. Instead,they held a political view of freedom in which liberty is understoodas the scope men have for political action. The institutionsthey designed direct the use of liberty to the common good.In light of this analysis, the issue of whether the Constitution'sprovisions concerning slavery and its treatment of women areindications of an inadequate view of liberty can be answeredin the negative.     

From anti‐slavery to third sector in development: The transition of non‐governmental organisations and limitations

In the 1800s, the work of non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) focused on opposing slavery up until the 1900s where their work changed from anti‐slavery to focus on development‐related issues like education, poverty, hunger, and so forth. The transition of the NGOs was motivated by the failure of the public and private sector to provide the needs of the communities. Just like the other sectors (public and private sector), the work of NGOs is somewhere somehow failing to meet the needs of the needy because of the challenges in their operation. Against this background, the present study traces the transition of these NGOs and its present limitations in development. In order to explore the transition of NGOs and its limitations, the study used secondary data to collect relevant literature. Furthermore, the strict textual analysis of the existing literature is used. The results of the study show that NGOs face challenges of accountability and transparency, capacity, and corruption. In recommendation, the study suggests that NGOs have to be accountable and transparent; moreover, they should be capacitated with necessary skills. Lastly, NGOs should stay away with the acts of corruption.     

The Space of Civil Society and the Practices of Resistance and Subordination

Abstract

We argue that the majority of civil society conceptualizations employ a narrow concept of the state and a narrow concept of civil society. The life history of a Brazilian woman demonstrates that as individuals travel through state institutions and civil society organizations (CSOs), they carry conflicting worldviews with them which bear on the practices of CSOs. With Gramsci we recognize civil society as a space where movements and the state struggle for hegemony; beyond him we conceptualize CSOs as contradictory, being simultaneously of and against the state, while the state is simultaneously outside and within them.     

从共同体到虚幻的共同体:马克思国家观嬗变的原因探究

从马克思不同时期的文本看,他的国家观经历了一个嬗变的过程。在《论犹太人问题》中,他将国家视为实现人的类本质和类生活的共同体(Gemeinwesen)。然而在《德意志意识形态》中,他将国家规定为虚幻的共同体(illusorische Gemeinschaft)。用词的变化反映了马克思国家观的变化。对现实的个人以及社会关系的发现,使马克思对共同体的理解实现了由逻辑到历史的转变,从而导致他的国家观变革。     

Labor's ace in the hole: casino organizing in Las Vegas

This article critically evaluates the argument that individuals and nations have a right to forget their past. Since our histories shape our identities, forgetting is unnecessary, impossible, and politically problematic. Cosmopolitanism allows individuals to combine memory and de-essentialized group identities with more universal identities. Further, governments have no right to forget the past, since they could use this right to avoid grappling with the legacies of historical injustices in the present. Against the view that time heals all wounds, I argue that promoting justice in the present requires us to recognize the legacies of historical injustices such as slavery and to promote some form of restitution.     

Bodies in abolition: broken hearts and open wounds

This paper explores some of connections between bodies and slavery in the antislavery discourses of the late eighteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on representations of violence and cruelty, and on the discourses of blood, sweat and tears in the eighteenth century to interrogate the bases of the humanitarianism discourses and what it meant to ‘compassionate’ the suffering of others. It argues that the connections between slavery, the body and citizenship lie in the socialization of sentience, the ‘complicated stings’ of social death and the idea of having a secure property in the person. Some of these connections were broken by the de-historicizing move towards focusing on the vulnerability of the slave and the power of the consumer. Using the slave sugar boycotts of 1791–1792 as a particular example, the paper argues that these more complicated stories are ‘leached out’ by discourses that treat slaves only as bodies, moralize consumption and rely on a neat split between public and private at the expense of a layered understanding of citizenship and empire, and of inequality, subordination, marginalization and social conflict. The article then traces some of the ways in which this emphasis on moralized consumption and disposable bodies resurfaces in current antislavery campaigns in the twenty-first century in the rhetoric of ethical consumption, risking the same ‘leaching out’ of political analysis, hollowing out our understanding of the link between slavery and citizenship.     

Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockean Contractarian Approach

Neither the concept of the totalitarian system nor the newly worked-out notion of 'socialist civil society' can express the social and political phenomenon of the rise and growth of independent groups and movements in Eastern Europe. Rather, it is suggested here that the Lockean contractarian approach should be used. This embraces mutually interacting ethical, empirical and analytic arguments which would take into consideration the state, the independent groups organized outside it, and the relationships between them. The utility of the model of the totalitarian state in understanding the origin of independent groups is discussed here. Lockean multidimensional individualism is suggested as a category expressing the political character of these groups, and Lockean teaching on absolute monarchy—a special form of the state of nature—is advanced as the means for analysing the relationship between these groups and the state of the Soviet type.     

政治学中的民族议题

突破中国民族话语中以“民族”概念专指少数民族的思维的限制就会发现,人类历史上的“民族”概念最早形成于欧洲,指的是具有国家形式的人群共同体。这样一种与国家结合在一起的民族,具体表现为国民的共同体,是在一个长期的历史过程中形成的。民族形成后便将形成过程中经历的人口国民化、国民整体化等蕴涵于自身,使其成为蕴涵一系列社会政治机制的人口组织形式,并为欧洲现代社会、现代国家和现代政治的形成奠定基础。在“民族”概念的使用范围拓展以后,不具国家形式的各种历史文化共同体也被以“民族”概念来指称和描述,从而使民族的种类迅速增加。这样的民族共同体又对民族国家的统一、稳定和治理产生着深刻的影响,在国内和国际政治关系中发挥着重要的作用。对如此形态多样和影响深远的民族现象,政治学者不能漠然视之,而必须积极主动地关注和研究。由此形成的民族议题,既是政治学理论和知识体系构建不可或缺的重要方面,也是解释中国现代国家的构建和发展及政治学知识体系完备和创新的重要渠道。     

Thomas Jefferson's Liberal Anticapitalism

This article reassesses Thomas Jefferson's political economy in light of debates about the influence of liberal and republican ideas on his thought. I argue that Jefferson embraced liberal premises, but used them to reach anticapitalist conclusions. He opposed neither commerce nor the prosperity it promised; he opposed working for a wage, and he did so on liberal grounds. The first section of this article shows that John Locke's theory of property turns on the justification of capitalist labor relations. The second section establishes, first, that Locke's argument played a decisive role in the development of Jefferson's own and, second, that Jefferson redefined its terms to fashion a forceful critique of wage labor. An examination of Jefferson's writings elucidates a neglected variant of the liberal tradition, prevalent in the United States until the Populist agitation. Its core is the stigma attached to working for hire as a diminished form of liberty, tantamount to wage slavery.