Rethinking Emancipation

Abstract

This essay considers the rhetorical and discursive logics that underpin the history, philosophy and programme strategies of International Justice Mission (IJM), a US Christian non-profit organization that has pioneered the use of ‘raid and rescue’ (partnering with law enforcement to raid places of work) as a strategy for addressing trafficking in the Global South. Emancipation from bondage is the conceptual and moral imperative that undergirds IJM's mission, along with many other anti-trafficking organizations that, like IJM, imagine themselves as ‘new abolitionists’ fighting trafficking as a modern-day form of slavery. By drawing on commonly held assumptions about the nature of slavery and freedom, IJM offers a problematic vision of what the liberated subject of rescue should look like: a non-white woman who literally moves from darkness to light because she has been rescued by IJM. This vision of emancipation enables IJM to enact a particular set of strategies and programmes that are carceral and coercive (such as indefinite holding in government remand homes) in the name of saving victims of trafficking. By way of contrast, the essay examines the programming and mission of SANGRAM-VAMP, a non-profit advocacy organization and sex workers' union in Maharashtra, India. By analysing the various conflicts members of SANGRAM-VAMP have experienced with the IJM field office in Maharashtra, this essay concludes by describing a transformation of the ground on which anti-trafficking initiatives could potentially base the project of doing justice. In placing the radically different politics of SANGRAM-VAMP and IJM in tension, the essay asks whether a counter-discourse is possible by reimagining emancipation as a project that foregrounds collaborative processes of action that are decoupled from the action of a single emancipator.