Although the exploitation of people for profit is not a new phenomenon, in the late 1990s and early 2000s international leaders, advocates, and the public became increasingly concerned about the risks of exploitation inherent in labor migration and commercial sex work. In 2000, the U.S. government passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA), which defined a new crime of human trafficking and directed law enforcement agencies to begin identifying and responding to this form of victimization. Following passage of the TVPA, U.S. media interest in human trafficking as a crime increased steadily, though the framing of the problem, its causes, and its solutions has changed over time. Media coverage of human trafficking spiked around 2005 and has risen steadily since that time. Human trafficking has become a “hot topic”—the subject of investigative journalism and a sexy plot line for films and television shows. Yet, the media often misrepresent human trafficking or focus exclusively on certain aspects of the problem. Research on human trafficking frames in print media revealed that portrayals of human trafficking were for the most part oversimplified and inaccurate in terms of human trafficking being portrayed as innocent white female victims needing to be rescued from nefarious traffickers. Depictions of human trafficking in movies, documentaries, and television episodes in the United States have followed a rescue narrative, where innocent victims are saved from harmful predators. Additionally, traffickers are commonly portrayed in the media as part of larger organized crime rings, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Incorrect framing of human trafficking in the popular media may lead policymakers and legislators to adopt less helpful antitrafficking responses, particularly responses focused on criminal justice system solutions.
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Human Trafficking and the Media in the United States
Rachel Austin and Amy Farrell
Article
Anti-Trafficking in Southeast Asia
Julie Ham
The positioning of Southeast Asia (comprising Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar or Burma, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) as an anti-trafficking hub belies the global relevance of regional patterns. The configurations of anti-trafficking vary across countries; however, the specific trends and patterns hold relevance to the region as a whole. For instance, the research on anti-trafficking in Thailand examines the co-constitutive interactions between the illegibility of human trafficking and the growth of the anti-trafficking industry, particularly in relation to market-based interventions. Critical research on Vietnam offers an instructive analysis of the fusion between humanitarianism and punishment that characterizes “rehabilitation” efforts in anti-trafficking. Research on Singapore and Indonesia considers the function of co-constitutive interactions between the hyper-visibility of sex trafficking and the relative invisibility of labor trafficking. In Indonesia—as a country of origin, transit, and destination—the fractured contours of anti-trafficking responses have produced unexpected or unpredictable interactions, marked by competing understandings of what trafficking is and the accountability of differing governmental bodies. Recent research on the Philippines illustrates the use of gendered surveillance in barring the departure of Filipino nationals as a means of “preventing” human trafficking. These patterns demonstrate the uneasy fusions and alliances among humanitarianism, market economies, law enforcement, and border control that mark responses to human trafficking in Southeast Asia.
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The Global Economic and Political Causes of Human Trafficking
Robert G. Blanton and Shannon Lindsey Blanton
While various forms of slavery and forced labor have existed throughout human history, trafficking in humans is a relatively new area of global concern, as specific laws date back only to 2000. As a legal concept, human trafficking is defined according to its requisite acts (recruitment, transport, harboring of victims), means (use of force, fraud, or coercion), and purpose (exploitation). As a basis for scholarly analysis and public policy, trafficking can be viewed in terms of multiple dimensions, as it constitutes a criminal activity, an egregious abuse of human rights, and a pervasive illicit market. Each of these frames suggests different scholarly approaches to examining trafficking, as well as different policy responses to combat it. For example, a criminal activity frame connotes a prosecutorial response toward traffickers by state agencies, while a human rights-based approach suggests increased attention and services to trafficking victims.
There is a significant, though underdeveloped, body of scholarship on the causes of human trafficking. Broadly put, extant work focuses on economic, political, and demographic variables, each of which are part of the wider array of factors that can make trafficking more or less likely. Economic factors can be assessed at both micro and macro levels, ranging from the cost–benefit analyses of traffickers to macroeconomic factors such as poverty and globalization. Political correlates of trafficking include armed conflict, the presence of peacekeepers, and the strength and capacity of domestic political institutions. For their part, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can also play a significant role in shaping state responses to trafficking. As trafficking commonly involves the movement of people across borders, some of the same demographic factors that drive migration are also associated with trafficking flows. Taken as a whole, there are still many underexplored avenues for future research. While well over a thousand articles and books have been published on human trafficking since 2000, a majority of extant research is non-empirical in nature, including general overviews of trafficking or analyses of relevant laws. A key factor contributing to this relative dearth of empirical literature is the lack of comprehensive data that reflects the complex and nuanced nature of trafficking. Given the policy-relevant nature of human trafficking, as well as its implications for human rights, there remains a great need for additional evidence-based research in this area.
Article
Sex Trafficking Policy
Kathleen Bergquist
Human trafficking, to include labor and sex trafficking, was recognized by the United Nations in 2000 through the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, supplemented by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol). Nation states that ratified the protocol signaled their intent to be legally bound by it and consequently to develop policies to implement within their respective countries. The definition of human trafficking generally includes the commercial exploitation of persons for labor or sex. The International Labour Organization estimated in 2016 that of the 24.9 million people trapped in forced labor, 4.8 million are being sexually exploited. This article provides a historical context for sex trafficking, some discussion about the political evolution of sex trafficking legislation, current knowledge, and practice.
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International Drug Trafficking: Past, Present, and Prospective Trends
Luca Giommoni, R.V. Gundur, and Erik Cheekes
Since the early 20th century, the illegal drug trade has received increasing focus throughout the world. However, the use of mind-altering substances predates attempts to prohibit or regulate them. Early control efforts date back to the teachings of Mohammed in the Koran, though wider-scale control efforts did not occur until the 18th century. Since that time, both the production of mind-altering substances and their regulation or prohibition has been commonplace throughout the world. Several illicit markets exist in response to the ongoing demand. Four notable products are cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and synthetically produced, mind-altering substances that are sold predominantly to users in North America and Europe.
The production, transportation, and usage of these substances are all impacted by the histories and geographies of the producer, intermediary, and user countries. Shifts in tolerance of certain substances; geopolitical events, such as war; international policy and policing initiatives, such as the implementation of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 and improved means of detecting illicit payloads at international boarders; and changes in demand for specific products have all influenced how trafficking routes and the organizations that participate in the drug trade form and adapt.
Regardless of these changes, one constant is that no aspect of the drug trade has ever been dominated by a single, monolithic organization; several illicit enterprises have historically come together to form the often supply global chains. In the 2011, the first darknet market, the Silk Road, emerged as a means by which some buyers and sellers could connect, thus potentially reducing the links of the supply chain. Ongoing changes in technology as well as shifts in the regulatory frameworks on controlled substances will impact illicit substances that are sold and how buyers and sellers interact, and will require innovated research strategies to evaluate their evolution.
Article
Human Trafficking: Exploiting Labor
Noël Busch-Armendariz, Maura Nsonwu, Laurie Cook Heffron, and Neely Mahapatra
Human trafficking has become a major national and international problem, and while research suggests that trafficking in human beings for the purpose of cheap labor is higher than trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, much less is understood about labor trafficking. This entry summarizes the current knowledge about labor trafficking including important definitions, describes ways in which people are exploited for labor, outlines related policies and laws, summarizes needs of survivors, and offers ways in which social workers are and can be involved in responding to this crime.
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Human Trafficking Overview
Fariyal Ross-Sheriff and Julie Orme
Human trafficking (HT), also known as modern-day slavery, has received significant emphasis since the early 21st century. Globalization and transnational migration trends continue to amplify economic disparities and increase the vulnerability of oppressed populations to HT. The four major forms of exploitation are labor trafficking, sex trafficking, state-imposed forced labor, and forced marriage. Victims of HT are exploited for their labor or services and are typically forced to work in inhumane conditions. The majority of these victims are from marginalized populations throughout the world. Although both men and women are victims of HT, women and children are heavily targeted. Interdisciplinary and multi-level approaches are necessary to effectively combat HT. Combating HT is particularly relevant to the profession of social work with its mission of social justice. To address the needs of the most vulnerable of society, prevention, intervention and advocacy strategies are presented. Roles and implications for social workers in education and practice and for the profession are presented at the micro level.
Article
Human Rights in East Asia
Ñusta Carranza Ko
East Asia is a region that has been the focus of discussions about economic development, democratization, nuclear proliferation, technological innovations, and health-related issues. Due to its historical past of colonization (including countries that have been colonizers and those that have been colonized), interstate and regional wars, involvement in world wars, and authoritarian governance, it is also a region that has experienced human rights violations, human rights advancements, and human rights–related policy developments. Thus, the study of East Asia and human rights encompasses colonial, Cold War, post–Cold War, and the post September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks periods of history. Based on the vast amount of scholarship on human rights in the region, a spectrum of approaches should be used to study human rights that (a) examines case-specific human rights violations which focus on vulnerable populations in society; (b) theorizes and questions the essence of human rights and its value systems; and (c) explores developments in human rights–related policy that involve transitional justice processes of truth-seeking, reparations, and criminal accountability regarding past human rights crimes. Examination of historic violations of women’s rights and children’s rights in the case of comfort women who were sexually enslaved by Japan’s Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War centers the victims and their experiences. A focus on minority rights leads to the consideration of issues of human trafficking of women and girls in Mongolia and North Korea, social and ethnic minority groups’ concerns in Japan and South Korea, and the plight of Uyghur people in China. The Asian (Confucian) values debate leads to consideration of why human rights have been questioned, why they may be considered as impositions, and which approaches can be taken to re-examine human rights with regard to this region. Finally, the discussion of transitional justice as it relates to East Asian states provides a much needed recognition of the importance of the region for innovating transitional justice policies.
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Unfree Labor in Colonial South Asia
Andrea Major
Various forms of labor obligation, coercion, and oppression existed in colonial India, but the supposed dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labor was rarely absolute. European slave-trafficking, internal trades in women and children, domestic slavery, caste-based obligations for agricultural and other labor, and capitalist systems such as indenture represented distinct but overlapping forms of “unfree” labor in the South Asian context. Enslaved Indians were exported to various European colonial possessions in the 17th and 18th century or provided domestic services within the homes of both the European and Indian elites. Meanwhile, various preexisting local labor relationships such as begar, caste-based obligation, and debt bondage involved elements of coercion, control, and ownership that mirrored some of the characteristics of slavery. These underwent significant changes in the colonial period, as the colonial state both tapped into and sought to reshape the Indian labor market to suit the needs of the imperial capitalist economy.
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Women, Drugs, and Violence in Sinaloa
Elaine Carey and Patricia Figueroa
As the United States approaches the fiftieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and Mexico is going through the second decade of its war on drugs, the costs and ever-escalating violence are difficult to ignore. Despite the arrests, extraditions, and successful prosecutions of leaders of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), the trillion dollars that have been spent in the United States and Mexico have done little to undermine the drug demand in the United States or protect Mexican citizens from increasing violence. With former Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s declaration of his own drug war, women have borne the increasing brunt of that violence. Certain women benefit from the lucrative drug trade due to their families’ involvement. Throughout the 20th century, women developed DTOs, but women have always had to fear violence from male competitors and law enforcement. Yet the majority of women who experience the drug trade experience it as users and victims. DTOs and their collaborators among the politicians and the police have acted with impunity. While legitimate actors such as police and politicians claim their support for security measures to protect women and children, these same actors have provided little empathy and support for victims. Women are both combatants in the drug trade and its collateral damage. Their experience with impunity combined with a lack of empathy for the countless victims on both sides of the border has led to a growing sense of hopeless along with growing resistance.
Keyword: drug-trafficking
Article
Organized Crime in Asia
Narayanan Ganapathy
The significance of Asia’s rising economy and emergent foreign trade provides a conducive climate for the proliferation of organized crime. A reflexive exploration of organized crime in the Asian context ought to address two interrelated issues. The first relates to the ontological and epistemological effort to delineating Asia as a region that is not simply demarcated from the West, but one that houses diverse socio-political archetypes within itself. This issue of framing nuanced Asian perspectives within a normative Western-centric paradigm is linked to the second issue that is, evaluating the status of criminology as a “theoretical science” whose efficacy lies in its universal applicability. The corpus of existing Asia-centric research has been met with methodological challenges in the form of a reductive western orientalist lens that obscures larger economic and social complexities behind an exoticised “Asian uniqueness.”
Organized Crime (OC) in Asia is varied along the contours of geographical, sociological and cultural particularities, as well as the individual colonial legacies of the region’s societies. However, a particular commonality in the form of a symbiosis between syndicated criminals and state actors on either side of the law, the penetration of the underworld into seemingly aboveboard politics, and the consequent blurring of lines between licit and illicit markets has been identified. This is inextricably linked to the pernicious and prevalent problem of corruption and governance in many of the countries in Asia, a problem that has grown parallel to the exponential economic growth the continent has had witnessed since the 1990s.
Easy market access and rising consumer demand underline the prominence of drug production and trafficking as well as the global trade in counterfeit goods within Asian OC. The region’s defining feature of housing diversified nations lends itself to a transnationally proliferated and dynamic drug-related crime (DROC) and counterfeit trading syndicates, with different countries producing and trafficking different and newer drugs, and counterfeit goods for varied markets. The global interconnectivity, afforded by the internet through the digitalisation of contemporary OCs, has compounded the problem where access to anonymous borderless markets and cryptocurrency transactions has facilitated the displacement of lucrative drug and counterfeit crimes both spatially and tactically, leading to the circumvention of traditional forms of social control. The lack of collaboration and coordination among the Asian countries in tackling the illicit trade points to an urgent need to develop a more efficacious international legal framework and effective collaborative enforcement modalities to combat OC. One area of concern is how increasingly transnational OC groups and activities have become an important means of financially supporting terrorist operations that continue to proliferate Asia, prompting a rethink of the existing conceptual framework of the crime-terror nexus.
Article
Organized Crime and Criminal Networks in Africa
Mark Shaw and Tuesday Reitano
Organised crime and criminal networks are an outcome of Africa’s weak systems of state reach and governance, and in turn they further undermine effective state-building. Defining “organized crime” is challenging in the African context. African policy discussions did not use this term until recently, and it is so broad that it covers an enormous range of activity. Nevertheless, it is arguably now generally used and accepted, denoting organized illegal activities by a group of people over time that generate a profit. Such terminology is also now widely referred to internationally and in a UN Convention (which defines an “organized criminal group” but not organized crime itself) to which almost all African states have subscribed. The term “criminal networks” is often also used in African debates, denoting the more flexible and dynamic criminal arrangements that characterize the continent. Organized crime and criminal networks in Africa appear in many different forms, shaped largely by the strength of the state, and the degree that political elites and state actors are themselves involved in them. Broadly, organized crime can be said to occur along a continuum on the continent. On one side are well-established and -organized mafia-style groups such as the hard-core gangs of the Western Cape in South Africa or militia style operations engaged in ‘taxing’ local populations and economic activities, both licit and illicit. In the middle of the continuum, are relatively loose, and often highly effective, criminal networks made up both of Africans (West African criminal networks being the most prominent) and a range of foreign criminal actors seeking opportunities. On the other end, are sets of criminal style entrepreneurs, often operating as companies (the Guptas in South Africa, for example) but with a variety of forms of state protection. Illicit financial outflows in particular are a serious concern, but governance and regulatory reforms will be far more critical than the suppression of illicit markets themselves by law enforcement agencies, given also evidence that suggests a high degree of collusion between some African police and criminals in several illicit markets. Violence too remains a key tool for criminal control and advancement at all points along the spectrum, with the strength of the state and the collusion between state actors and criminal groups often determining the form, intensity and targets of that violence. That is one reason why the link between organized crime and conflict on the continent remains a concern, with actors (who in many cases exhibit criminal or mafia-style attributes) seeking to enhance their resource accumulation by control or taxation of criminal markets. Given this and other factors, the impact of organized crime on Africa’s development is severe, and although in some key markets the illicit economy provides opportunities for livelihood and a source of resilience, these opportunities are negated by the extent of environmental damage, the growth of drug use among the poor and marginalized, human rights abuses of migrants and those being trafficked, the violence engendered, and the economic distortions introduced.
Article
Adult Education for African Victims of Human Trafficking
Antonio Alfaro Fernández and Beatriz Villora Galindo
For decades and due to the dire situations that exist in many African countries, the migratory phenomenon to Europe has witnessed an unprecedented increase. The desire to seek a better future, to flee from poverty, hunger, and war, among other reasons, has caused the victims to employ legal or illegal means to leave their country and reach Europe.
The receiving countries have increased the restrictions to welcome immigrants from African countries, which means the arrival of migrants by illegal means has grown spectacularly. Likewise, this situation has caused trafficking in persons, especially women, to become a common phenomenon in Europe. Spain, due to its geographical location, is one of the countries where the greatest number of people are exploited.
The eradication of this problem involves the identification of the exploited and liberation from their captors. But the problem does not end with their release; psychological and educational intervention is essential to achieve their integration. The importance of designing and developing educational programs are main objectives, including language learning, professional training, establishing good habits of nutrition and hygiene, and providing alternatives for leisure and free time.
These education programs, designed for adults, should be initiated in shelter houses where the victims are first placed. Multidisciplinary teams formed by professionals in education, psychology, nursing, and social work can cooperatively help the victims, offering the best method for successful integration. The final objective is to provide competences to the people included in the program, who can then leave the shelters, join the local community, and live autonomously and independently in the host society.
Article
The Harms and Crimes of Mining
Yuliya Zabyelina
The world characterized by scarcity of natural resources and the growing demand for metals and minerals has provided strong incentives for illegal mining. Mining-related crimes have become a desirable illegal business for organized criminal groups, rebel forces, terrorist organizations, and private mining companies due to the low risks involved and the frequently limited ability or willingness of authorities to monitor mining areas and supply chains of metals and minerals. Illegal mining has devastated and displaced communities, contaminated clean water sources, and ravaged ecosystems and biodiversity. The problem commands both individual responses from the countries directly impacted by illegal mining as well as responses from the entire international community.
Article
Human Trafficking and Religious Movements
Yvonne C. Zimmerman
The prominence of religious groups, religious motifs, and religious and theological claims in the anti-trafficking movement is useful for exploring how social movements are shaped by religious actors and claims and, in turn, use religion in the process of creating social change. The anti-trafficking movement can be situated in relation to three key previous social movements: the 18th–19th-century abolition movement that sought to abolish chattel slavery, the 19th–20th-century anti-white slavery campaigns of the social purity movement that sought to eliminate prostitution, and the late 20th-century movement that sought to address Christian persecution through promoting religious freedom. By highlighting the way that the anti-trafficking movement draws on and extends the moral claim-making of each of these social movements, these earlier movements are revealed as shaping the social movement ecology out of which the contemporary anti-trafficking movement emerges and in which it functions. Further, exploring the movement to end human trafficking in relation to these social movements suggests at least three significant ways religion matters in social movements: as a source of moral legitimacy, as a source of moral clarity, and as a cultural resource. As a source of moral authority, religion provides a source of grounding that lends credibility to movements’ moral claims by situating them in something larger than immediate interests and experiences. As a source of moral clarity, religion is a source of the moral values that animates social movements and sustains them through challenges. As a cultural resource, religious sensibilities influence how social movements perceive issues and formulate responses to them.
Article
Women in Lesotho
Scott Rosenberg
During the pre-colonial period, women were valued for their productive and reproductive abilities. When women married, their parents received bohali (bridewealth) from the man’s family. During the colonial period women became increasingly responsible for running the household while men were away. Although this gave women more power on a daily basis it also led to increasing domestic violence. In order to support themselves and their families, women have sought out domestic economic opportunities as well as participating in migrant labor. Historically, beer brewing and sex trafficking were two of the economic opportunities available to women in Lesotho and South Africa. Today, women make up the overwhelming majority of labor in the textile factories. Although Lesotho is a patriarchal society, women have made gains in terms of being elected to parliament and serving as regents, yet they are still not allowed to serve as a chief in their own right. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has hit women in Lesotho especially hard.
Article
Transnational Organized Crime and Terrorism
Katharine Petrich
A significant, policy-relevant relationship exists between terrorist groups and transnational organized crime. However, definitional challenges, disciplinary boundaries, and legal logistics all contribute to the mischaracterization of the relationship, leading to piecemeal responses and uneven academic attention. International studies research tends to focus on one or the other, with an emphasis on terrorist group dynamics and choices. Two enduring rationales for separating the study of terrorism from that of transnational organized crime exist: the “greed versus grievance” debate, which argues that organizations pursue either private (financial) goals or public (social or organizational change) goals and the “methods not motives” argument, which suggests groups may overlap in their tactics but diverge in their strategic goals. Terrorist violence by criminal groups is largely held separate from the “transnational crime and terrorism” literature, often categorized instead as “criminal governance” rather than terrorism studies. The reality is much more nuanced: both group types pursue a variety of objectives and engage with a spectrum of actors which may or may not share their aspirations. Members are diverse in their priorities, a fact that is often lost when analysis collapses the rank and file with leadership into a monolithic bloc. Additionally, globalization has increased opportunities for groups to pursue different activities in different theaters. In areas where terrorist groups are contesting for political control and seeking to present themselves as viable alternative governance actors, they may be less likely to work openly with illicit actors, but in areas (or countries) where they have little governance ambition, criminal networks may be important public partners.
These groups intersect in a spectrum of ways, from engaging in temporary ad hoc relationships designed to achieve a specific goal, to fully incorporating the opposite type’s motive into organizational priorities. Political ambitions largely center on power and control, but illicit activities are wide ranging, with the most prominent involving firearms, drugs, and people. Further, there are several important enabling factors that foster these relationships, including corruption, illicit financial flows, fragile states, and lootable resources. When these enabling factors are present, diversification and relationship building are more likely, increasing organizational resilience and making demobilization less likely. These factors, particularly corruption, also increase the chances of organized crime entering the political system.
Looking ahead, both policymakers and academics should consider transnational organized crime and terrorism more holistically. Work that engages with only one element will fall short in assessing the dynamics of irregular conflict, leading to incomplete analysis and weak policy recommendations. Observers should cultivate the flexibility to think in terms of networks and variety across geographic contexts—the way that a terrorist group behaves in one area or with one type of criminal group does not necessarily predict its behavior globally.
Article
Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking
Nadejda K. Marinova
Trafficking and smuggling in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights. In the world today, there are more slaves than at any other time in human history—these present-day slaves are the victims of human smuggling and human trafficking. Human trafficking refers to the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of forced labor, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. Almost every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims. The 1980s saw human trafficking emerge on the political agenda of states as well as of supranational and international organizations. By the early 1990s, human smuggling—which is extremely important in illegal migration—has prompted policy attention. The academic scholarship on human smuggling focuses on the factors for the increase of trafficking, the structure and organization of smuggler networks, and on the question of whether smuggled individuals are victims or perpetrators of a crime.
Article
Contemporary Sources of Human Rights Violations
Mahmood Monshipouri
Understanding the current disjuncture between human rights, authoritarianism, populism, nationalism, globalization, and forced migration has never been more urgent, especially in the face of gradual collapse of the liberal world order. Failure to address human rights violations will have grave consequences. Without understanding the sources of human rights violations, international human rights standards will do little to ensure their realization across the globe. Yet it is unrealistic to search exclusively for general laws and discernible patterns of human rights violations that could be held across all cases. While it is possible to systematically explore both proximate and underlying causes of human rights violations, such an analysis must be grounded in theory. It is thus important to unpack the sources of endemic human rights abuses, including those having to do with authoritarianism, xenophobic nationalism, sectarianism, torture, child labor, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced migration, human/sexual trafficking, statelessness, and refugee crisis. To that end, there are two broad categories of human rights violations: domestic and international. Although there is agreement on the most pressing problems of human rights violations, there is no consensus over the answers. Our findings have broader implications for literature on human rights abuses, moral responsibility in the postliberal world order, and social justice.
Article
Slavery in Islamic Central Asia
Jeff Eden
By the late 19th century, when much of Islamic Central Asia was conquered by the Russian Empire, the region was home to tens of thousands of slaves. Most of these slaves were Shiʿa Muslims from northern Iran, though the slave trade also ensnared many Russians, Armenians, Kalmyks, and others. Slave labor was especially commonplace in the Sunni Muslim domains of Khwarazm and Bukhara, where enslaved people constituted a substantial proportion of all agricultural workers, domestic servants, and soldiers. Slaves also labored in many other roles, and an individual slave could be tasked with a variety of jobs. Slaves served, for example, as concubines, craftsmen, miners, herdsmen, entertainers, blacksmiths, calligraphers, and even, in rare instances, as government officials.
Before the 16th century, the majority of the slaves in Central Asia—defined here as the region extending from the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea through Xinjiang, China, and from southern Siberia to northern Iran—seem to have been trafficked to the region from India. This changed in the 16th and 17th centuries, as a significant number of Iranian war-captives were brought north and enslaved during the course of numerous armed conflicts between the Central Asian Uzbeks and Iranian Safavids. Many of these slaves evidently labored on the region’s rapidly expanding agricultural estates.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, frequent Turkmen raids into northern Iran resulted in tens of thousands of Iranian Shiʿas being captured and funneled into a booming slave trade in Khwarazm and Bukhara. Further north, a much smaller number of Russians were seized and sold into slavery by Kazakh nomads along the steppe frontier.
The region’s slave trade declined in the late 19th century and seems to have remained dormant throughout the Soviet period. The post-Soviet period has witnessed a resurgence of human trafficking throughout Central Asia. In recent decades, local governments and international organizations have labored with mixed success to combat a new kind of slave trade, as Central Asian victims are trafficked by criminal cartels to neighboring countries, or to other regions of the world, for the purposes of forced labor or sexual exploitation.
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