Human Trafficking-Terrorism Nexus: When Violent Non-State Actors Engage in the Modern-Day Slavery

Abstract

Why do some militant organizations participate in human trafficking? We investigate this question by introducing a new dataset that records insurgent organizations’ involvement in four types of human trafficking: sexual exploitation, forced recruitment, slavery, and kidnapping. Marrying our data to the BAAD2I population of insurgent organizations, we uncover the organizational attributes related to human trafficking. We find that groups with wide alliance networks and territorial control are more likely to commit human trafficking. Organizations that are losing command of the territory and suffering rank-and-file losses are also more likely to turn to human trafficking. Our study sheds theoretical light on insurgent groups’ involvement in crime. It also contributes to the empirical scholarship on sexual violence by violent groups by studying different forms of human trafficking in both conflict and non-conflict environments. Our paper presents an original dataset and empirical analysis of insurgent groups’ human trafficking patterns.

Moving Through Conflict: Transit Migration and Rebel Capacity in Mali

“…Yet, territorial control is difficult to maintain amidst high competition. As Molenaar and Damme (2017, 10) point out, migrant smugglers in Northern Mali “have to navigate a complex physical terrain where they are up against an increasingly fragmented number of armed groups seeking to collect spoils.” In competitive environments, I argue that rebels employ responsive tactics to exploit accessible resources, which reflects similar findings by Avdan and Omelicheva (2021) concerning rebels’ involvement in human trafficking.…”