The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking

TLDR

The article examines how human trafficking is simultaneously framed as a security threat and a humanitarian problem, exploring the mechanisms that allow these contradictory identifications to coexist. Using a Foucaultian analysis of governmental interventions, the study focuses on women trafficked for sex, highlighting their dual identification as illegal migrants/victims and as prostitutes/suffering bodies. The research demonstrates that bodies in pain governed by a politics of pity are transformed into psychological cases managed by risk technologies, revealing that humanitarian and security interventions are mutually reinforcing rather than exclusive.

Abstract

This article unpacks two constructions of human trafficking: as a security threat and as a humanitarian problem. Restricting its focus to trafficking of women for the sex industry, the article highlights the double identification of these women as illegal migrants and victims, prostitutes and suffering bodies. How are these schizophrenic identifications possible? An analysis of the security and humanitarian articulations as governmental interventions in Michel Foucault's sense of the term locates a perverse continuity. As the bodies in pain governed by a `politics of pity' metamorphose into psychological cases to be governed by risk technologies within a `politics of risk', the humanitarian and security interventions are shown to be in no way mutually exclusive.