Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life

7 Securing Life: Human Trafficking, Biopolitics, and the Sovereign Pardon

166 CHAPTER SEVEN Securing Life Human Trafficking, Biopolitics, and the Sovereign Pardon Claudia Aradau The end of the cold war saw the reemergence of human trafficking on the global political agenda as a new security threat integrated in a continuum of organized crime, illegal migration, drug trafficking, and terrorism. The words of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (2007) echo this logic: “The threat to the United States posed by criminal organizations engaged in smuggling of any kind cannot be overemphasized. By exploiting vulnerabilities in border integrity, these criminal smuggling organizations, whether they traffic in humans, narcotics, or counterfeit merchandise, are an unquestionable threat to the security of the United States.” While the myth of white slavery was reactivated in the public imaginary, security professionals rendered the problem of human trafficking actionable as a security threat (Aradau 2008). In the midst of a context defined by the “War on Terror,” human trafficking has never been far from the overarching concerns with terrorism, organized crime, or irregular migration. In Europe, the EU Hague Programme on the area of freedom, security , and justice has reinforced the securitization of human trafficking by enjoining the member states to develop a more effective approach to “cross-border problems such as illegal migration, trafficking in and smuggling of human beings , terrorism and organized crime, as well as the prevention thereof” (Council of the European Union 2004, 3). Placed in this continuum of threats, human trafficking appeared to partake of the sovereign inscription of power that has been characteristic of national security. Anti-trafficking strategies entailed the sovereign abandonment of women whose irregular status removed them from Securing Life • 167 the purview of law while being included as de facto sources of labor. Victims of trafficking were to be deported or criminalized in a sovereign move to reduce vulnerabilities and reinforce the “carapace” of the state against undesirable circulations of people. Nonetheless, human trafficking has also been integrated within a competing scenario of threat. “Human trafficking is a serious crime that violates human dignity and poses a threat to human security in our societies” (Biaudet 2009). Human security is a newly coined concept—usually attributed to the 1994 undp Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme [undp] 1994), which renders visible threats to the individual. This move of expanding the concept of national security has been made possible by taking “life” as the referent object of security. It has also been particularly relevant for human trafficking, as security was increasingly claimed as the “right” of victims of trafficking rather than the survival of the state. Within the broader global shift to human security—“responsibility to protect” and care for life—the lives of victims of trafficking became the sites of the reinscription of life as worthy of protection. Anti-trafficking campaigns have used the mobilizing potential of life to efface the security construction of human trafficking by presenting an image of trafficking victims as suffering lives. Rather than undesirable subjects, potentially risky noncitizens who were to be deported or detained, women were increasingly represented as lives worthy of care, victims worthy of compassion, and bodies deserving of treatment. Their vulnerabilities and behavior became the focus of analysis with the purpose of restoring them to normality. In International Relations (IR), this move from national security to human security has been analyzed in terms of a shift from sovereign power to biopower . Security as biopolitics takes hold of life, manages its abnormalities, and attempts to prevent “dangerous irruptions” of risk in the future (Aradau 2008; Dillon 2007; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008). The shift from people to population, noted by Foucault in his lectures, Security, Territory, and Population (2007), marks a transformation of governance from sovereign juridicopolitical rationalities to the rationality of political economy, of utility, and costbenefit calculations. As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008, 279) put it, “[s]ecurity mechanisms . . . statistically mapped the contingent behavioral characteristics of populations.” This understanding of security that mobilizes knowledge of populations and of the body, anticipatory technologies, and preventive interventions upon the life of subjects has allowed IR scholars to show how security has become a much more pervasive form of governing the lives of populations. Alongside a conceptualization of national security as sovereign punitive power, retaliation, killing, war, and geopolitics, the influence of Foucault’s work on 168 • Claudia Aradau biopolitics has led to engagements with the insidious ways in which security permeates the everyday. The biopolitics...