Activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the international media have repeatedly singled out the Mekong region as a hotspot for 'sex trafficking'. Yet, in recent years anti-trafficking campaigns that focus on prostitution have lost momentum, witnessed by a decline in project activity and media attention. This article suggests that a moral panic relating to prostitution has partly been overshadowed by a broader focus on the Thai labour sector, particularly the fishing industry. At the same time, this shift coincides with a discursive reorientation away from 'trafficking' towards 'modern slavery'. This article explores the gendered dimensions of this shifting regime of migration governance which in effect replaces women and girls with men and boys as the central locus for action. Although this change must be understood in light of structural changes within the Thai economy and a broader compassion and programme fatigue, this article points to the similar moral registers that both 'sex trafficking' and 'slavery at sea' invoke. Neoliberal modes of activism coupled with emergent social media help explain why anti-trafficking and modern slavery discourses have gradually redirected attention away from sex to fish.

Over the past few years some governments and development organizations have increasingly articulated cross-border mobility as "trafficking in persons". The notion of a market where traffickers prey on the "supply" of migrants that flows across international borders to meet the "demand" for labour has become a central trope among anti-trafficking development organizations. This article problematizes such economism by drawing attention to the oscillating cross-border migration of Lao sex workers within a border zone between Laos and Thailand. It illuminates the incongruity between the recruitment of women into the sex industry along the Lao-Thai border and the market models that are employed by the anti-trafficking sector. It discusses the ways in which these cross-border markets are conceived in a context where aid programming is taking on an increasingly important role in the politics of borders. The author concludes that allusions to ideal forms of knowledge (in the guise of classic economic theory) and an emphasis on borders become necessary for anti-trafficking programmes in order to make their object of intervention legible as well as providing post-hoc rationalizations for their continuing operation.

in terms of her lineage and her personal qualities. Harriden also notes that the military regime attempted to use Aung San Suu Kyi's marriage to Michael Aris to discredit her, drawing on nationalist discourses that censured Burmese women who married foreigners. The final two chapters of the book analyze women's position in Burma post-1988, with chapter eight addressing women's "advancement" (the quotation marks belong to Harriden) under the military regime since then, and chapter nine discussing the various women's organizations formed by Burmese women in exile. While the women's organizations associated with the military regime were able, by their association with the dictatorship, to obtain a sizeable membership, these organizations have accomplished little in the way of substantial betterment of women's lives in Burma, serving rather to defend the regime against international criticism. The expatriate women's organizations dedicated to reform, many of which integrate non-traditional conceptions of gender equality in their platform, seem to be a more promising vehicle for change. Harriden concludes with an assessment of the possibilities for collaboration and connection between these expatriate organizations and groups within Burma. This work is a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on Burma, and is innovative in its focus on the nuances of gendered power relations. As noted above, this work is strongest when discussing women's access to power in Burma from the Konbaung era onwards, but overall Harriden's research is notably thorough. This study will be of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and gender relations, and anyone who seeks a better understanding of contemporary Burmese society.

Over the last two decades, increasing attention has been given to trafficking in persons globally. Governments, international organisations and the media generally assume that trafficking is immensely profitable. This paper problematises this assumption in light of ethnographic research within the sex industry along the Thai-Lao border. It argues that the cross-border recruitment of Lao women into the Thai sex industry constitutes a mixture of capitalist logic and patron-client relationships. It is therefore not possible, as some antitrafficking programs attempt to do, to read probabilities of trafficking out of mechanical models of profitability and unilateral maximisation of social actors.

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