Chilean State Knowledge Infrastructures on Human Trafficking: A Site of State Geopolitical Legibility

The production of knowledge is essential to face human rights violations. Knowledge is a means of conceiving and characterising these atrocities and determining their magnitude. It is also crucial for holding the State accountable, validating victims' experiences, ensuring compliance, improving policies, and delivering justice. Yet, in today’s era of data-driven governance where States gather vast amounts of citizens’ information, State knowledge in this area is problematic: there are discrepancies in victims’ accreditation criteria, scattered and compartmentalised information, legal limitations hindering collaboration, overlooked cases, victims being compelled to retell their stories, and significant gaps in addressing human rights violations effectively.

Approaching State governance of human rights abuses as a semiotic and material practice, this paper looks at the infrastructure of knowledge with which a post-transitional State understands and deploys itself about contemporary human rights violations. The production and use of socio-material artefacts –protocols, norms, laws, databases, information systems, computer tools, inter-sectoral roundtables, reports, and programmes– give life to this infrastructure. Through multi-sited ethnographic means, I follow how the Chilean state handles the complex crime of human trafficking, examining how harm is translated into the language of the State, the shift between rationales, victims' experiences across state offices, and the intricate processes behind the formulation and use of human rights standards, protocols and services. I argue that state knowledge infrastructures contribute to creating and reinforcing social order, constituting a fruitful site of state legibility, where the effects of global politics and national governance intersect with domestic political agendas, as well as national and international human rights politics.