UC Irvine

Human trafficking recently shifted from being considered a marginal problem to an urgent one. As recent as twenty years ago, however, laws criminalizing trafficking were few and public perception mostly understood slavery as an issue of the past. Why do issues enter the global arena and receive worldwide attention when they do? Why is there suddenly so much urgency and activity around a problem that has, in fact, existed throughout history? Social scientists increasingly devote attention to how global norms and policies emerge when they do, and how international policies are translated into meaningful action. This dissertation draws from cultural and global sociology to explain why human trafficking recently emerged as a significant global issue of concern, and how we might make better sense of its diffuse effects among practitioners and affected populations.To address the first question, I draw from over 300 UN documents to analyze why the UN Trafficking Protocol helped motivate international activity against trafficking in 2000 when a strikingly similar UN trafficking treaty in 1949 failed to do so. Contrary to popular accounts, trafficking did not re-emerge as an urgent problem in 2000 because the problem was worse than before, nor did it succeed because states suddenly had new political interests in combating the problem or because movements succeeded in getting trafficking on the agenda. Rather, I argue that the macro-cultural transformations that occurred during the decades after 1949, including decolonization and the institutionalization of human rights made trafficking’s perceived harms or “wrongs” at that time become increasingly obsolete. After the issue was resurrected and reshaped by delegates at UN conferences during the 1990s, its new framing as an issue of violence against women and transnational crime quickly gained traction and attention within the contemporary global environment. By probing the complex relationship between macro-cultural changes and political action, these findings provide new insights into why issues enter the global arena when they do, how existing policy paradigms transform into new ones, and the institutional mechanisms by which new global norms emerge. To address the extent to which human trafficking law actually addresses how trafficking works and victim vulnerabilities I use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to analyze over 800 interviews with formerly trafficked persons in Cambodia, a country routinely referred to as one of the “worst” places for child trafficking. Based on findings that suggest vulnerability to exploitation in Cambodia is intimately tied to structural and social inequalities more so than a typical perpetrator-victim incident, I problematize the legal definitions and remedies for trafficking propagated by international law that focus on criminal activity or the attribution of specific types of rights rather than structural vulnerabilities.