Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives edited by Michele Ford, Lenore Lyons and Willem van Schendel (review)

Whilst many academic voices have called attention to the flawed architecture of global anti-trafficking efforts, to date most of these voices have trained their critical comment on the United States and Western Europe. Southeast Asia is also what we might call an “anti-trafficking intensive region”, where a myriad of state, third-sector, and international interventions are aimed at reducing the crime of human trafficking. It is on these interventions and on their moral, political and ideological underpinnings that this book focuses. As its Introduction states, “This book contributes to the growing critique of the anti-trafficking agenda by exploring the ways the UN Trafficking Protocol has been taken up by policymakers, non-government organizations (NGOs) and international agencies in Southeast Asia” (p. 1). This contribution is well received and, arguably, much needed.

The volume comprises an introduction and eight substantive chapters, collectively covering the breadth of the Southeast Asian region from the Philippines, Cambodia, the Thai-Lao border, Indonesia, the Chinese-Vietnamese border, the Indonesian-East Malaysian border to the Myanmar-Thai border. While Singapore is a notable absence from a volume whose goal is exhaustive treatment of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, Indonesia is perhaps overrepresented in the chapters. The volume nonetheless provides good coverage of the region. As notable as its geographical breadth is the methodological reach of the volume. One of the recurring problems with the construction of knowledge about all aspects of human trafficking and anti-trafficking is a lack of deep, ethnographic insight on the part of researchers. Yet all but one of the chapters (that on the Philippines) in this book draw on deep ethnographic engagement with state and non-state actors involved in anti-trafficking work.

Thematically, the chapters give depth to three crucial — and interrelated — insights that could advance knowledge about anti-trafficking in the region (and indeed elsewhere). First is the suggestion that anti-trafficking organizations are often driven by motives and agendas that do not reflect a primary concern for the human rights of trafficked persons themselves. Although many others have made this argument, some of the contributors to this volume illustrate this point particularly well. Zhang Juan’s chapter suggests that, although borders are often important sites of anti-trafficking work, on the Chinese-Vietnamese border at Lao Cai economic interests militate against the regulation of possible trafficking-related activities. Nicholas Farrelly’s chapter on Burmese migrants in Thailand also highlights the “strategic disinterest” (p. 141) in human trafficking on the part of the Myanmar government, as remittances and bribes flow in the wake of outmigration. Michele Ford’s and Lenore Lyons’s chapter makes a similar argument about ulterior motives for undertaking anti-trafficking work. They reframe the work of NGOs active on Indonesia’s periphery as activity driven in part by funding and the organizations’ other concerns as much as by any actual evidence of the need for heightened anti-trafficking interventions.

The second thematic convergence or insight in the volume is evident in the focus of many of the chapters on borders and maps. As a geographer, I found my interest piqued in particular by Zhang Juan’s and Michael Eilenberg’s chapters. In different ways, these chapters demonstrate the manner in which bordering processes on the part of states and anti-trafficking activities intersect to produce spaces in ways that reinforce, subvert or reconfigure international borders. Because borders can be intensely significant sites for anti-trafficking efforts (through the surveillance of the movement of people), they merit exceptional attention in any critical review of anti-trafficking efforts. At the same time, one shortcoming of the volume is the lack of engagement with internal borders and intra-state bordering processes as they relate to anti-trafficking efforts. In some of the countries under consideration in the volume — particularly the Philippines and Indonesia — internal bordering processes...