By Rebecca L. Feldmann

An inherent tension underlies the duty to prevent trafficking. On the one hand, nation-states are required to take border control measures aimed at preventing trafficking. At the same time, such measures must respect international obligations toward asylum-seekers and other migrants relating to the free movement of people. In the past twenty years, countries such as the United States have developed increasingly sophisticated systems designed to regulate and restrict the movement of people across borders. However, the same period has seen an increasing disregard for the human rights of the very people who are crossing those borders. In order to fully meet the duty to prevent trafficking, states must come to recognize the importance of involving victims of this crime in the solution, which will never happen if countries demonize all migrants as criminals and traffickers. In short, states that seek to lead the fight against human trafficking need to work with victims (including foreign national victims in the state’s territory) and other partners (such as non-governmental organizations and victims’ attorneys) to ensure that their rhetoric more closely matches reality.

Utah Law Review, 659 (2023)

By Lucia Bird

Governments need to ensure responses to migration and human smuggling don’t make it more dangerous for migrants and more lucrative for criminals. Mobility has been a key facet of resilience across much of the African continent throughout its history, and those on the move have long relied on the support of smugglers to facilitate the journey. However, the birth of the modern migrant smuggling industry as a multi-million global business is much more recent, as is the perception of the migrant smuggler as a highly organised criminal figure.

ENACT Africa, 2021. 88p.

By INTERPOL

  With this strategic analytical report, INTERPOL, under the European Union funded project ENACT, assesses how trafficking in human beings for the purpose of organ removal (THBOR) affects North and West Africa and to what extent this crime connects both regions with other parts of the world. Globally, when the supply of organs cannot be fulfilled by ethical transplant practices the supply is often done with illegally sourced organs. This implies that organs have been purchased from individuals that have been coerced, through a wide range of means, into having their organ(s) removed. Moreover, THBOR is reported to be a highly lucrative form of human trafficking, with victim -donors receiving only a small fraction of the total amount of money that organ buyers are willing to pay to brokers and the medical sector for the sourcing of organs. While this type of trafficking is believed to be largely underreported, it is important for law enforcement agencies in North and West Africa to have a nuanced approach to THBOR and to set priorities, so as to identify potential victims, investigate trafficking in human being cases that can be motivated by the organ trade and target criminal networks that facilitate THBOR. Several factors facilitate the organ trade in North and West Africa. The global shortage in organs is one of the most commonly referenced driving factor but is not the unique cause that has made THBOR a profitable business for Organized Crime Groups (OCGs).

Lyon, France: INTERPOL 2021. 38p.

by Joe Eyerman, Melissa M. Labriola, Bella González

Reducing the prevalence of all forms of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and child sexual exploitation, is a national priority that puts the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a prominent role. Given the scale, evolving nature, and complexity of labor trafficking, combating the problem poses a significant challenge. The DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) anti–human trafficking program is assessing the current state of and future needs for labor trafficking research in the United States. This effort will serve as a starting point for future social science–based S&T anti–human trafficking research and actions focused on labor trafficking.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 

Edited by  Christiana Gregoriou

This open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and seeks to explore both dominant and marginalised points of view. The authors take a cross-disciplinary approach, utilising analytical tools from across the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, literary and media studies, and cultural criminology. It will appeal to students, academics and policy-makers with an interest in human trafficking and its depiction in the modern day.

Cham:  Springer Nature, 2018. 160p.

By Bruce Ravesloot, Tanay Amirapu, Chandler Smith, Sehdia Mansaray ; TANGO International, Inc.

This research report critically assesses the risks and needs of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia across three thematic domains: refugee protection, human trafficking, and human smuggling. The research draws from three national contexts: Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The research explores the following questions: What is the regional and national policy landscape for refugee protection, anti-smuggling, and anti-trafficking? What are the risks and opportunities in these domains?

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2022. 97p.

By  Hui Yin Chuah

This briefing paper highlights the key findings from the Research Report, “Refugee Protection, Human Smuggling, and Trafficking in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia”. The research aims to assess the risks and needs of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia across three thematic domains, with particular focus on the national contexts of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The three domains are: protection; human trafficking; and human smuggling.

Denmark: Mixed Migration Centre, 2023. 9p.

Edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen and Shahram Khosravi  

"This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power. 

New York: London: Routledge, 2021. 229p.

By Kevin Fredy Hinterberge

‘Combatting’ irregular migration is one of the key challenges to migration management at EU level. The present book addresses one of the most pressing structural problems regarding the EU’s return policy: the low return rate of irregularly staying migrants. In this regard the EU Return Directive obliges Member States to issue a return decision, yet only 40% of such decisions are enforced annually. Moreover, despite the political and legal efforts, the EU is not making any significant progress in enforcing the rules it has laid down in the Return Directive. The legislation of EU Member States may, however, serve as a source for possible solutions to ‘combat’ the problem of irregularly staying migrants. This is why the book compares the system of regularisations in Austria, Germany and Spain. Regularisations constitute an effective alternative to returns because they terminate the irregular residence of migrants, not through deportation, but rather by granting a right of residence. Regularisation is therefore understood as each legal decision that awards legal residency to irregularly staying migrants. As is shown by the examination and comparison of regularisations in Austria, Germany and Spain, differentiated systems of regularisation exist at national level. However, EU regularisations supplementing the present return policy would be more effective at ‘combatting’ irregular migration at EU level.

 Baden-Baden: Nomos; Hart Publishing, 2023. 398p.

Edited by Emre Bayamlioğlu, Irina Baraliuc, Liisa Janssens, and Mireille Hildebrandt

Profiling the European citizen: why today's democracy needs to look harder at the negative potential of new technology than at its positive potential.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,    148p.

Edited by Ulrich Pallua, Adrian Knapp and Andreas Exenberger

"The publications of the interdisciplinary and internationally networked Research Platform “World Order – Religion – Violence” seek to improve our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and violence. It therefore deals especially with the return of religious themes and symbols into politics, with the analysis of the link between political theory and religion, and finally with the critical discussion of the secularization thesis. At the centre of the research are questions concerning the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful coexistence on a local, regional, national and international/worldwide scale between communities in the face of divergent religious and ideological convictions. Its task is to initiate and coordinate thematically related research-efforts from various disciplinary backgrounds at the University of Innsbruck. It creates a network between departments, research-teams and single researchers working on topics of religion, politics and violence. The overall aim of the research platform World Order-Religion-Violence is to promote excellence in social and human science research on religion and politics at the University of Innsbruck and to guarantee the diffusion of this particular competence on a national and international level."

Innsbruck: innsbruck university press, 2009. 256p.

Edited by  Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires

Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458p.

 By Michael J. Perry

This forward-thinking book illustrates the complexities of the morality of human rights. Emphasising the role of human rights as the only true global political morality to arise since the Second World War, chapters explore its role as applied to often controversial issues, such as capital punishment, the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage and criminal abortion bans.

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2023. 172p.  

By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino   
SSince the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.

Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino   

Since the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.

Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

By Alexander Betts

Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres, 2013. 255p.

Edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen

This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 528p. 

Edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch  

 Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

London; New York : Bloomsburgy Academic, 2017. 269p.

By Adele Valeria Messina

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 498p.

By Cesraéa Rumpf

Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women’s identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as “criminal-addicts.” While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women’s stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions’ promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women’s vulnerability to violence.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 234p