Injection: Modern Slavery and Political Strategy

Abstract The political fortunes of recent campaigns targeting “modern slavery” and human trafficking have been shaped by strategic calculations and institutional interests. Different actors have been attracted to the category of modern slavery for different reasons. For civil society campaigners, modern slavery offers a way of harnessing the iconography of transatlantic enslavement to draw attention to “exceptional” cases of exploitation. Conversations about modern slavery can also be strategically useful for many governments and corporations, since they can help to deflect or displace more challenging questions about the systemic abuse and exploitation of precarious migrants and workers. These calculations play a key behind the scenes role when it comes to determining whether different cases of exploitation and coercion are classified as the same as, similar to, or separate from historical systems of enslavement.