Description
Modern slavery is a policy area that has seen substantive changes and proliferation of legislation in the last decade. For instance, the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act led to new legislation both domestically and internationally. While there has been increasing scholarly attention to this issue area, two factors have been overlooked. First, most studies analyse modern slavery legislation through a domestic lens, ignoring ideas on regulation of modern slavery at the international level, how they are promoted, by whom, and what alternative ideas may have been side-lined in the process. Second, as a result of this domestic focus, these studies miss an important debate on ‘responsibility’, in other words which level of governance should regulate this phenomenon. To address these gaps, we map actor coalitions and their proposed policies to study the emergence and evolution of modern slavery-related policy proposals to understand how desired responsibility levels may have changed over time. To achieve this, we use four different textual sources combining domestic and international levels (news agency reports, speeches from German and British national parliaments, and United Nations General Assembly speeches) between 1990 and 2020. Our analysis is based on Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), a mixed-methods technique that combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative social network analysis. We find that policies on modern slavery have shifted over time from assigning responsibility at the domestic level increasingly to the international level, and that Global North actors increasingly advocate for increased regulation in the Global South.
