Responsible citizens, political consumers and the state

Abstract

Civil society organisations’ activist campaigns contain calls to action that draw discursive boundaries around the allocation of responsibility to citizens, governments and other agents for addressing major social issues. To address the problem of modern slavery, civil society groups are increasingly calling upon citizens to engage in acts of political consumerism to catalyse corporate social responsibility. This article assesses the ways in which responsibility for modern slavery is configured between different actors, particularly citizens and the state, through a qualitative content analysis of ‘calls to action’ embedded in campaign materials collected from anti-slavery awareness campaigns and initiatives from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America over the last decade. We chart the configuration of responsibility across a broad spectrum of anti-slavery activist approaches, highlighting the ways in which more traditional activism centres the state as powerful actor, while political consumerism campaigns frame the state as either enabler of activism or entirely absent. These activist framings resonate with current policy frameworks, in assigning an increasingly limited burden of responsibility on the state for addressing the problem of modern slavery.