This paper demonstrates why and how a fuller geographical perspective extends contemporary scholarship on human trafficking within and beyond the discipline.We employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom (UK), to depict how the processes underpinning human trafficking are nonlinear and operate instantaneously at multiple intersecting scales and temporalities and through diverse mobilities. The analysis problematises the discrete and homogeneous notion of space coupled with a linear conceptualisation of time and, more specifically, the normative portrayals of recruitment, transit and exploitation as distinct and sequential phases of human trafficking. Instead, the individuated experiences of trafficked persons are examined in relational geographies of inequality, manoeuvring and mobilities. Such a conceptual shift ensures that efforts to understand and combat human trafficking address its effects as well as the wider social relations and structural conditions that facilitate exploitation. We conclude the paper by outlining how a relational-geographic perspective has the potential to foster new forms of dialogue and inquiry within and beyond the discipline.
K E Y W O R D SEastern Europe, exploitation, human trafficking, inequality, mobilities, relational geographies 1 | INTRODUCTION Human trafficking is inherently spatial, comprising cross-cutting processes of exploitation within and across local, regional, national and international borders. Yet, academic, policy and media understandings of human trafficking tend to rely on a discrete and homogeneous conceptualisation of space coupled with a linear conceptualisation of time (Smith, 2017). Our aim in this paper is to contribute to critical debates over structural inequalities that underpin human trafficking (Anderson & Ruhs, 2010;Andrijasevic, 2010;Lewis et al., 2015;Piper et al., 2015) by offering a geographical conceptualisation of human trafficking that explicitly recognises the relational nature of space and time. Using in-depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom (UK), we examine why viewing processes such as recruitment, transit and exploitation as distinct and sequential phases of the human trafficking process is reductive. In turn, we reframe human trafficking as a relational composition that spans multiple spaces and temporalities.The paper is structured as follows. First, we outline relational perspectives on human trafficking within critical inter-disciplinary scholarship and suggest that this could be enriched by engaging explicitly with relational conceptions of space (and time). Second, we introduce the writings of Massey, Bergson and Deleuze and present the theoretical framework for ---