Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) started as many projects do – by doubling down on an idea from the pub the night before.
Our (very nerdy) founders decided that they were fed up with policymakers and activists blaming trafficking on individual ‘bad apples’ – on evil criminal syndicates who exploit people because they’re criminals and that’s just what criminals do. This, they knew, was a wholly insufficient explanation for why so many people around the world end up in highly exploitative work.
So they decided to set up a megaphone to disabuse people of this illusion. Their goal was to explain the structural causes of labour exploitation so clearly that even the most ardent fans of criminal justice couldn’t deny their existence or effect. Poverty. Immigration status. Social exclusion. Lack of labour protection. Purchasing practices. Outsourcing. Concentrated corporate power. Governance gaps. This is where we began.
Late 2014 was a propitious time to enter the conversation around trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour. Lobbying around the UK’s Modern Slavery Bill was in full swing (it became law in March 2015), and the summer of migration that same year pushed irregular movement – and the labour power that comes with it – to the very peak of the political agenda. We were critical of the MSA from the very start. But we were still carried along by the wave it helped create.
As luck would have it, that same year openDemocracy’s legendary (and sadly departed) editor Rosemary Bechler put out a call for academic partnerships. She wanted to smoke scholars out from behind their paywalls and make them into public intellectuals again. We responded, and BTS was born.
From academic outreach to trade magazine
BTS was supposed to be a one-year project. Our plan: public education. We’d drummed up a team of seven editors – Neil Howard, Genevieve LeBaron, Julia O’Connell-Davidson, Joel Quirk, Prabha Kotiswaran, Sam Okyere, and Cameron Thibos – and managed to cobble together just enough funding to crowd-source a comprehensive curriculum on all things forced labour.
The resulting BTS Short Course featured 152 authors distributed across special features on popular and political representations, forced labour in the global economy, state and the law, history, migration and mobility, race, ethnicity and belonging, childhood and youth, and gender. This was BTS at its most acerbic. We delighted in calling out anti-trafficking’s bullshit, and did so time and time again.
Like a garage band, we struggled to produce our sophomore album. The year was up but we weren't ready to stop, and having spent our debut throwing rocks at houses, we tried to become more constructive by commissioning policy debates with diverse viewpoints on topics like supply chain governance and the utility of awareness raising. With the help of fabulous guest editors, we also created our first collections from writers with lived experience, including Sex workers speak: who listens? and Domestic workers speak: a global fight for rights and recognition.
Around this same time, we also started taking our show on the road. We convened a critical discussion on Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 (to end extreme exploitation) in India; produced a massive open online course in South Africa; and co-hosted a series of seminars on trafficking in Thailand with our new friends at the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW).
New faces like Elena Shih and Penelope Kyritsis joined the team. And we partnered with other scholars like Gabriella Sanchez and Luigi Achilli, who have now become dear friends, to host their groundbreaking Human Smugglers Roundtables online. These brought ethnographers of human smugglers together from around the world to explore what motivates the putative ‘perpetrators’.
THE COMPLETE BTS ARCHIVE
BTS articles are accessible, engaging and packed with cutting-edge analysis. They're perfect for scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and anybody else wanting to better understand exploitation in the global economy today.
For our tenth anniversary, we've collected everything we've ever published into a single, searchable e-handbook. Containing 1000 articles from 800 authors, this book has you covered no matter where your interests lie. A gift to you, our readers, from us.
BTS was getting out in the world, engaging with stakeholders, and find new ways to spread its message. It was also evolving away from a tightly controlled, pedagogic publishing project to something more like a trade magazine for the field of forced labour.
Our core products remained thematic, and over the following years we produced special features on universal basic income, rethinking child work, sex workers’ rights, organising precarious workers in the global south, philanthrocapitalism, border externalisation, the criminalisation of migration, and border violence on the English Channel. As our horizons expanded, our initial focus on the trouble with trafficking became less central. We pushed ourselves to find new things to say.
By year five we finally hit our stride. The forced labour and human trafficking team at Humanity United, a philanthropic foundation in California, found value in our work and offered to back our project. They gave us a level of budget and security that allowed BTS to achieve things that had previously been out of reach.
This included bringing on more staff, first the amazing Emily Kenway and later on Melissa Pawson, who more than filled her shoes. It involved setting up more debates and deep dives, commissioning professional journalists as well as academics, supporting young researchers, and paying for content from people with lived experience and authors in the Global South. And it meant we could produce stunning illustrations to accompany our work, drawn by the incredibly talented Carys Boughton. Humanity United made all this possible, and we will always be grateful for Ryan Heman’s unwavering support for us – thank you so much.
Aluta continua – the struggle continues
We are now 11 years old. The structural roots of exploitation are no longer news (even if they remain routinely ignored by many actors), and we have tired of repeating this core message.
The field has also evolved, and it now looks very different than it did in 2014. While debates over sex work are still consequential, the politics of rescue have been increasingly supplanted by the politics of risk. New buzzwords have taken centre stage, like monitoring, compliance, due diligence, and exposure. And more and more issues have been thrown into the box marked ‘modern slavery’. It is now overloaded to the point of becoming entirely incoherent and unmanageable.
Along the way, we’ve also accepted that our basic prescription of more workers’ rights and migrants’ rights isn’t enough. Exceptionalising extreme abuse may not help, but neither does sidelining the fact that extreme abusers do exist. Ignoring structure is misguided, but so too is making structure the whole story. After Ella Cockbain joined our team and pushed us to pay more attention to other aspects of trafficking, primarily child sexual exploitation and criminal exploitation, it became increasingly clear to us that the original BTS formula also has its limits.
As we argued in our ten-year anniversary feature, more disaggregation and precision are needed. Anti-trafficking is not one thing, but many things. Interventions (and critiques of those interventions) ultimately do well when they recognise the many complex systems involved: structural, situational and individual factors all play a role.
The wealth of expertise which can be found in older fields must also be recognised. Anti-trafficking work has a habit of reinventing the wheel without any reference to decades of established scholarship or the practices and frameworks of other movements. Disaggregating trafficking creates additional space for experts on intimate partner violence, drugs, adolescence, labour, development, and many others besides.
After more than a decade of doing this work, we, as others before us, have decided that the best way to fight trafficking and slavery is to let mainstream anti-trafficking shrink in our imaginations and to work with other movements and frameworks to build better alternatives. As we argued in the introduction to our farewell series, this is not giving up the fight, but rather:
allows exploitation to be addressed through the methods championed by longstanding, community-driven movements against sexual violence and economic exploitation, or for migrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and environmental, racial and gender justice.
If this focus on building ‘solidarity beyond silos’ resonates with you, please check out our call for papers over at the Anti-Trafficking Review. There, we want to take forward the conversations sparked by the brilliant – and often uncharacteristically hopeful – contributions of our farewell series on solidarities. In this bleak global political climate, some more hope, inspiration and alternatives are sorely needed.
BTS was a project for its time and place, and we are immensely grateful to the over 1000 authors who contributed their wisdom to making it a success. It has been an honour to publish for you, and we hope you found our work useful.
Now we are closing our doors. This has not been forced upon us by our bosses, funders, or circumstance – it is our decision. BTS has run its course, and we have achieved more than we ever thought possible. While exploitation remains as alive and well as it was when we started, we leave knowing we did the best we could to shift the needle, even if it never swung as far or as fast as we’d once hoped it would.
Times change. And it’s time for something new.
Thank you for being with us.
