Freedom Markets: The Moral and Political Economies of Human Trafficking in China, Thailand and the U.S

This project is a global and multi-sited ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking through state- and market-based approaches to managing low-wage labor migration and women’s work. Empirically, this project compares faith-based and secular approaches to anti-human trafficking work China and Thailand. From 2008-2013, I completed 40 months of ethnographic participant observation at an evangelical Christian vocational training center and secular anti-trafficking governance project in both Beijing and Bangkok, and their sites of movement organizing and consumer activism in Los Angeles. Studying global sites across this movement, the dissertation dissects the “global connections” as well as disconnections between transnational social movement activists, global governance institutions, states, markets and movement subjects—low wage women workers, inclusive of both those who are identified and unidentified as ‘trafficked.’

My dissertation argues that despite global justice goals, faith-based and secular factions of the human trafficking movement reproduce women’s global subordination at the discursive and labor process levels. American evangelical Christian missionary organizations recruit sex workers in Beijing and Bangkok to work as jewelry-makers and sell this jewelry through the bustling anti-trafficking movement in the U.S. Arguing that jewelry represents a proxy commodity for freedom from enslavement and a virtuous wage, these programs create a transnational moral economy of low wage women’s work, where traditional exchanges of wage for labor are replaced with affective commitments between First World rescuers and their purported victims in the Global South.  On the other hand, secular governance efforts, like the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking focuses their attention on holding nation states accountable to transnational norms and treaties. They graft existing state institutions of labor, migration, gender rights onto the framework of human trafficking, thereby inadvertently strengthen nation states’ ability to control and punish marginalized populations, including migrant workers, marriage migrants and sex workers.