Contemporary Slavery: The Rhetoric of Global Human Rights Campaigns ed. by Annie Bunting & Joel Quirk (review)

The cover of Contemporary Slavery signals to readers that this is not one of the usual books on modern slavery—there are no images of chains, no photos of distressed or undressed young women, no snapshots of exploited laborers. Instead, Beth W. Stewart's enigmatic painting resistance with its layers of text and color woven together with slashes of red seemingly carved into the surface draw attention to the book title and subtitle The Rhetoric of Global Human Rights Campaigns. Stewart's inspiration for the painting invoke the challenges of interpreting contemporary slavery: "Sometimes, what we feel and sense lose meaning as soon as the threads are untangled and made legible in the formulaic ways expected for public consumption."¹ Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk, two leading scholars on gender and contemporary slavery, have brought together a wide range of human rights scholars and scholar-activists to focus on this problem. The twelve chapters offer case studies of contemporary exploitation that are defined as "slavery" and examine the implications of this conceptualization for the way these forms of exploitation are understood, described, analyzed, and dealt with in law, policy, and in the public sphere. What makes this collection unique is its unflinchingly critical approach to the rhetorical framing of "contemporary slavery" in global human rights discourse and campaigns.

In her Foreword, Gulnara Shahinian, first United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery gets to the heart of the current political dilemma inherent in the politics of human trafficking and contemporary slavery.² While governments and the global organizations to which they belong, including the United Nations, enthusiastically make proclamations, treaties, laws, and policies condemning human trafficking they are less willing to acknowledge slavery as a separate category for analysis and action. Decades of fighting against human trafficking have not resulted in the abolition of forms of exploitation that can be defined as slavery and which are based on multiple forms of discrimination and abuses of personal and political authority aimed at vulnerable groups of people within societies and those who attempt to flee their exploitation and abuse by crossing borders.

Contemporary slavery is examined through three lenses: Cause, Rhetoric, Practice. Four chapters in each three parts examine case studies from around the world. These structural divisions aren't definitive as many of the chapters explore all three themes. The authors come from a range of disciplines including anthropology, business, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology, and they critique various methodologies applied to contemporary slavery. Most authors practice at the intersection between scholarship and activism on human rights and contemporary slavery. The editors have not enforced conceptual or thematic consistency so readers will identify some contradictions in critiques and use of terminology and concepts between the chapters. The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery are appended to the book. Both editors, Bunting and Quirk, and a contributing author, Jean Allain (one of the world's leading experts on the legal definition of slavery in international law) were coauthors of the Guidelines.

In the opening chapter Bunting and Quirk ask the obvious but rarely answered question—Why has the fight against "modern" or "contemporary" slavery, often defined as the "fight against human trafficking," not resulted in a significant decrease in these forms of exploitation? Modern slavery as human trafficking has become the most widespread human rights issue of the twenty-first century. Anti-slavery and anti-human trafficking campaigns permeate every level of politics and activism from grassroots to global and yet the "problem" seems to be increasing on every front with only minimal success at alleviation. Bunting and Quirk argue that this dilution of the concept of slavery into a general term for exploitation is part of the problem. Moreover, they are highly critical of the "sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial interventions" employing common rhetorical strategies and images that permeate contemporary activism which achieves very shallow support and results.^3...