Mapping worldwide efforts to combat human trafficking

Worldwide efforts to combat human trafficking have emerged in the last 20 years with advocates working to address the trade of people under conditions of force, fraud or deception.  How has contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy spread around the world and what accounts for its rapid development?  Competing perspectives in global and transnational sociology offer very different explanations.  One perspective, world polity theory, emphasizes the development of global norms disseminated by international nongovernmental organizations around the world and adopted by states.  A second perspective calls attention to powerful states in the world system that dominate transnational advocacy efforts due to their control of funding and their political and ideological hegemony in international governmental organizations.  Neither perspective adequately addresses the agency of actors in the global south, whether governmental or nongovernmental.  This paper will report the preliminary findings of an ongoing research study that is collecting and analyzing data about anti-trafficking advocacy globally through a census of anti-trafficking organizations, networks and programs.  Aside from documenting a new phenomenon, the choice of anti-trafficking efforts provides a unique case that it may well complicate both theoretical perspectives that can be used to explain its development.  Contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy may show a strong tendency toward regionalization rather than a pattern of general diffusion or a top-down process imposed by governments in the global north.  The collection of empirical data will help us to better understand the dynamics of anti-trafficking advocacy worldwide.