Legal Institutions and Human Trafficking in a Shifting Climate

Abstract

While both international law and climate change researchers have shown how legal institutions and climate change impact human trafficking flows in origin and destination countries, little attention is given to the ``intermediary'' countries through which individuals are trafficked en route to their destination. This study develops a two-part theory to explain how the effects of anti-trafficking legalization and climate shocks impact these intermediary countries. First, we argue that the diffusion of anti-trafficking laws will induce pressures on traffickers to diversify their trafficking routes. We then theorize that because climate change-induced shocks impose costs on both states and traffickers, these costs confound the effect of legal institutions by incentivizing traffickers to shift their operations into less costly areas. Using data on human trafficking networks mined from the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, we show with inferential network analysis (1) how legal institutions impact trafficking through these intermediary countries and (2) how natural shocks impact the importance of different states as preferred trafficking routes.