Description
Human Trafficking is one of the most politically charged categories of the 21st century. The dominant political narratives of trafficking demand protection of people on the move through strict border controls, freedom of ‘victims’ trapped in some exceptional labour relations through raid and rescue, and punishment of ‘traffickers’ through criminal justice responses. However, critical scholars consider these anti-trafficking interventions as ‘collateral damages’ and often demand for structural changes both in the immigration regimes and labour relations. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (and a multi-site border ethnography), in one of the most 'trafficking-prone’ regions of Nepal, I argue that these narratives produce and multiply contingent bordering practices for the people on the move. In this paper, I bring the scholarly debates on ‘Human trafficking’ into dialogue with the critical border studies to empirically examine diverse bordering practices, various mobility struggles and creative subversions. I argue that these subversions which highlight excess of mobility over control produced due to the irreconcilable conflicts between people on the move and the forces of control could effectively contribute to the ongoing conceptualisation of dynamic rescaling, respatialisation, and reconfiguration of borders. This challenges the existing conceptualisation of ‘Human Trafficking’ by highlighting a narrative based proliferation of non-exclusive bordering practices.
