In this article, I interrogate how the UK government constructs and manipulates the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant. Specifically, I analyse how the government aligns aspects of its anti-trafficking plans with plans to enhance extraterritorial immigration and border control. In order to do this, I focus on the discursive strategies that revolve around the UK’s anti-trafficking initiatives. I argue that discourses of human trafficking as prostitution, modern-day slavery and organised crime do important work. Primarily, they provide the government (...) with a moral platform from which it can develop its regulatory capacity overseas. It is not my intention to suggest that the government’s anti-trafficking plans are superficial, and that extraterritoriality is the sole driver. On the contrary, I argue that complex interrelationships exist and while the government’s interest in protecting vulnerable women from sexual exploitation may seem to be paramount, I assert that in fact it intersects with other agendas at key points. I consider how government action to protect vulnerable women in trafficking ‘source’ and ‘transit’ countries such as development aid and repatriation schemes relate to broader legal and political concerns about protecting the UK from unwanted ‘Others’. (shrink)

The analysis in this article provides an alternative interpretation of trafficked women’s self-presentation before the courts. I use complete observations of German judges deposing women in camera who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against their traffickers. My objective is to develop and inform a different account of the women’s self-presentation by prioritising the narrative accounts of their ‘lived’ experiences of trafficking. Invoking Judith Butler’s analysis of the complex transactions between subjectification and subversive agency and emerging debates in the health arena (...) in psychosocial theory on resilience, I ask: How is trafficked women’s self-presentation in criminal proceedings an expression of their agency and resilience? (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on our personal experience of acting as ‘independent academic experts’ in an European Union policy forum, to reflect on how the EU utilises gender to legitimise certain policy discourses in combating sex trafficking. Starting from our personal experience, we draw on wider feminist research on gender expertise and on Fraser’s new reflexive theory of political injustice, to consider how the EU structures debates in this area to determine ‘who’ is entitled to speak and be heard (...) on this issue. In a context in which sex trafficking policy intersects with a variety of competing agendas on – among other things – law and order, organised crime, immigration, asylum and border security policy, our argument will suggest that the exclusion of critical feminist voices and lack of alternative perspectives permits much scope for continuing inequality and injustice. (shrink)

This paper uses social capital theory to explain contemporary slavery in the context of American professional sports leagues. While traditional slavery was legallyabolished in the United States (US) during the nineteenth century, using the label slavery to describe professional athletes is often dismissed because these athletes are wellcompensated performers with access to incremental compensation through commercial endorsements. As active players, athletes have opportunities to build and leverage social capital, yet, after they retire from competition, these opportunities frequently diminish. We contend (...) contemporary slavery exists for professional athletes and during their careers they are bound to their owners via “gilded cage” slavery, which is attractive to enter yet difficult to exit. We also contend that during this “bondage,” athletes build and maintain social capital; yet upon retirement, athletes are limited in opportunities to leverage socialcapital to improve their own situations or those of their communities. (shrink)

International food aid has long been known to be motivated by domestic and foreign policy objectives as well as humanitarian concerns. The policy objectives sometimes complicate delivery of emergency food, and lead to situations that result in adverse effects on the economic and agricultural systems of recipient countries. Despite the long history and extensive documentation of such effects, they were observed to occur once again during the 1992 Somalia intervention. This intervention encountered many frequently described barriers to effective use of (...) emergency food aid. It also set a new precedent; for the first time, troops were deployed to enforce the safe delivery of food. This action led to the creation of an army of occupation engaged in military conflict with the very people it had come to serve and, eventually, to further deterioration of the country's food economy. The Somalia intervention provided further evidence for the need to uncouple humanitarian food aid from other policy objectives, and to design and manage emergency and long-term food aid programs to maximize benefits, minimize adverse consequences, and strengthen local agricultural production and marketing systems. (shrink)

Societies with a higher level of income inequality tend to have lower levels of intergenerational income mobility. Known as the Great Gatsby Curve, this negative relationship in part derives from greater intergenerational economic heritance among the poor. Societies with higher rates of relative poverty will have a higher level of income inequality, but they will also tend to have lower intergenerational mobility due to the reduced capacity of low-income persons to become upwardly mobile. Reviewing relevant research in psychology, we describe (...) how poverty is associated with decreased psychological resources that compromise the competitiveness of low-income persons for superior attainment in the educational system and for greater productivity in the labor market. Economic deprivation in itself thus leads to a “vicious circle” of disadvantage that diminishes intergenerational mobility even without the existence of any culture of poverty or monopolistic institutions in the economy. (shrink)

Throughout 2019, retired athletes Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies, Kelly Holmes and Paula Radcliffe all spoke publically about what they perceive to b...

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung and The Open Society and Its Enemies, contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, translated into (...) English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie, at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨urzburg School. The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx, an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that most important advances in science are revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one that many philosophers attribute to Kuhn. Another insight, also often forgotten, is the emphasis in Chapter 23 on the social character of science, which acts as the main custodian of its claim to objectivity. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge stands at the threshold of his last major philosophical phase, the period from his retirement from the London School of Economics in 1969 until his death in 1994. The two great books that he wrote before he came to London, Logik der Forschung (1934) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), contain much more than the innovations in the theory of scientific method and the theory of democracy for which they are famous. Logik der Forschung, (...) translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), is by no means just a tract, even a revolutionary one, on the methods of science, since about one third of the text is devoted to searchingly original treatments of the frequency theory of probability and of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, whilst the unpublished manuscript on which the book was based, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (1979), at whose content it often hints, presents a wealth of significant material on the psychology of human learning and its biological context. Popper had, after all, been a student of Karl B¨ uhler, and had absorbed the theories of problem solving developed within the W¨ urzburg School (Popper 1974a, § 15). The Open Society and Its Enemies, for its part, is not so much a book defending democratic liberalism as a defence of democratic liberalism nestling within a book that discusses every other topic under the sun. It offers profound and provocative studies of the thought of Plato and Marx (see Hacohen 2000, Chapter 9, for a critical appreciation), an abundance of scholarly, if often controversial, historical interpretations of the work of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Wittgenstein, Mannheim, and others, the elements of a new theory of rationality, and many elucidations of the workings of science that go beyond what is explicit in Logik der Forschung. One insight worth mentioning, since it is little known, is the clear recognition in section II of Chapter 11 that the progress of science is typically revolutionary, not cumulative; a commonplace today perhaps, but one.... (shrink)