Contemporary Slavery

Contemporary Slavery brings together a cast of leading experts to carefully explore how the language of slavery has been invoked to support a series of government interventions, activist projects, legal instruments, and rhetorical and visual performances.

Annie Bunting is an associate professor in the law and society program at York University in Toronto, teaching in the areas of legal pluralism and human rights. She has published articles in journals including Social and Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, Canadian Journal of Human Rights and chapters in various book collections. She is currently directing an international research collaboration on forced marriage in conflict situations with historians of slavery and women’s human rights scholars. She is the coeditor (with B. Lawrance and R. Roberts) of Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016).

Joel Quirk is a professor of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Joel is the author or editor of seven books, including The Anti-Slavery Project (2011) and Mobility Makes States (2015). He is a current member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, where he serves as Rapporteur, and is also an editor for openDemocracy’s “Beyond Trafficking and Slavery.”

Contributors: Jean Allain, Jonathan Blagbrough, Roy Brooks, Annie Bunting, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Andrew Crane, Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Benjamin Lawrance, Joel Quirk, and Darshan Vigneswaran

Contemporary Slavery is a must-read for every academic, practitioner, and activist working in the field of slavery and human trafficking… Each of the chapters provides a new perspective, and the strongest impact is gained by just this: the holistic, diverse representation of observations, analysis, and research ... this book is an invaluable compilation of thoughtful, nuanced chapters, which build a case for more careful academic engagement with the language of slavery.

Mark Goodale, professor of cultural and social anthropology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland:
This volume significantly enlarges our understanding of slavery in the contemporary world. The authors, collectively and individually, put their mastery of the interrelated literatures to excellent use, resulting in a collection that is insightful, innovative, and methodologically diverse.

Sally Engle Merry, Silver Professor of Anthropology and associate chair, New York University:
This is an important, fascinating, and comprehensive collection that addresses the nature of contemporary slavery in its wide range of manifestations. The authors make a compelling argument that when social movements fail to distinguish slavery from the related and often overlapping concepts of trafficking, forced labour, and forced marriage, they do a disservice both to our collective understanding of these issues and to the development of effective interventions.