Description
Among European Union institutions, its member states, and external partners, issues of migration are increasingly discussed and incorporated into other policy areas. For instance, policies and agreements on trade, development cooperation, and stability and peace progressively mention and directly aim to address priorities related to migration management and control. In this paper, we ask: To what extent have the language and agendas of migration gradually entered and came to dominate debates and policies in the field of modern slavery? Through discourse network analysis, we map actor coalitions and their proposed policies to study the discursive links between migration and modern slavery between 1990 and 2021. To achieve this, we use four different textual sources (news agency reports, speeches from German and British national parliaments, and United Nations General Assembly speeches). We assess actors and their statements within a long-term historical and institutional context by using the concept of recontextualisation. We demonstrate that discourse and policies on modern slavery have shifted over time from an underlying logic of human rights and corporate responsibility to ideas that are associated with coercive migration control such as national security, border controls, and criminalisation to protect from a threatening external other.
