Tacking towards freedom? Bringing journeys out of slavery into dialogue with contemporary migration

Martins, Ângelo; Davidson, Julia O’Connell

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2021.1886062

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Respondent 9 (UK-based MNE) explained that the multinational fishery had implemented a labour recruitment scheme and partnered with the government and NGOs to address migrant worker vulnerabilities. The threat of deportation is crucial to migrant workers’ vulnerability to exploitation (Martins Junior and O’Connell Davidson, 2021; Theron, 2019). In response, the MNE had established support centres for migrant workers in countries in which its supply factories were based.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multinational enterprises’ narratives about and approaches to modern slavery: an exploratory study

Robb

Michailova

2022

RIBS

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Purpose Globalisation plays a major role in the existence and persistence of modern slavery, one of the most extreme examples of human rights abuses in recorded history. This paper aims to explore how multinational enterprises (MNEs), as central players in international business (IB) activities, relate to modern slavery. This paper focusses on human rights–minded MNEs and investigates their narratives and proactive approaches to tackling modern slavery. Design/methodology/approach This study conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with managers and consultants with substantial knowledge on the topic. This study also gained insights from a business conference on modern slavery organised by a New Zealand ministry in 2021. Findings This study identified four MNE narratives and three approaches to responding to modern slavery. Practical implications This paper discusses the challenges faced by MNEs when addressing modern slavery and outlines the relevant implications for MNE managers. Originality/value The scholarly conversation on modern slavery in the field of IB is in its infancy. This paper offers an account of how MNEs deal with modern slavery. In addition, while most studies take a critical angle and focus on problems, this study focusses on progressive and human rights–minded MNEs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multinational enterprises’ narratives about and approaches to modern slavery: an exploratory study

Robb

Michailova

2022

RIBS

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“…. ) and are open to multiple directions and detours" (Martins andDavidson 2022, p. 1481). Their struggles, however, are neither irrational, devoid of meaning, nor irrelevant to historical memory, as we have seen.…”

Section: Marilia Loureiro (2022)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona

Laforcade

2023

Humanities

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Afropean anthropologist, philosopher, and art curator Dénètem Touam Bona is an original “border thinker” and “crosser” of geographic and conceptual boundaries working within a tradition of Caribbean historical poetics, notably represented by Édouard Glissant. He explores ideas of “fugue” and “refuge” in light of the experience of maroons or escaped slaves, key actors of the simultaneous expansion of freedom and industrial-scale chattel slavery in the Americas. In “Freedom as Marronage” (2015), Neill Roberts defines freedom itself as perpetual flight, and locates its very origins in the liminal and transitional spaces of slave escape, offering a perspective on modernity that gives voice to hunted fugitives, defiant of its ecology, enclosures, and definition, and who were ultimately excised from its archive. Touam Bona’s “cosmo-poetics” excavates marronage as a mode of invention, subterfuge and utopian projection that revisits its history and representation; sacred, musical, ecological, and corporeal idioms; and alternative forms of community, while also inviting contemporary parallels with the “captives” of the global border regime, namely fugitives, nomads, refugees, and asylum seekers who perpetually evade norms, controls, and domestication. He deploys the metaphor of the liana, a long-stemmed tropical vine that climbs and twines through dense forests, weaving relation in defiance of predation, to evoke colonized and displaced peoples’ subterranean evasion of commodification, classification, control, cultural erasure, and ecological annihilation. This article frames his work within an Afro-diasporic history and transnational cultural criticism that envisions fugitivity and exilic spaces as dissonant forms of resistance to the coloniality of power, and their relevance to understanding racialization, representations of the past, and narratives of freedom and belonging across borders.

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“…Yet as many critical migration scholars have observed, the journeys and experiences of people on the move do not neatly fall on one side or the other of the voluntary/forced and legal/illegal binaries or slot easily into administrative categories. Moreover, because the journeys of those who move to escape precarious political and economic situations are rarely neat, quick, and/or linear passages from a point of origin to a pre-determined point of destination (Collyer 2012;Collyer and King 2016;Innes 2015;Kuschminder and Waidler 2019;Yildiz and Sert 2019;Schapendonk et al 2020;Martins and Davidson 2021), individuals often move across blurred conceptual binaries and categories at the same time as moving through space and time (Cresswell 2006;Stock 2019). This was certainly the case for most of our interviewees.…”

Section: Blurring the Voluntary/forced Binary: 'Asylum' 'Trafficking'...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossing the Binaries of Mobility Control: Agency, Force and Freedom

Martins

Davidson

2022

Social Sciences

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This article draws on qualitative data on journeys to Europe or Brazil undertaken by adults and teenagers from Sub-Saharan African countries to develop a conceptual analysis of the blurriness of the lines drawn between supposedly different types of movement via referencing the conceptual binary of forced/voluntary movement (such as asylum, trafficking, smuggling). It questions the liberal model of ‘agency’ that is employed not just by state actors, but also by many antislavery, anti-trafficking, child rights, and refugee rights activists, to construct boundaries between different ‘types’ of people on the move. Conceptual divisions between refugees and economic migrants, trafficked and smuggled persons, forced and voluntary labourers, child and adult migrants, and the idea of ‘modern slavery’, deflect attention from the structures that limit the choices open to people on the move. This article argues that the voluntary/forced binary encourages a tendency to falsely conflate choice with freedom and works to preserve the illusion that human freedom is a defining feature of liberal democratic societies rather than working to universally protect the freedoms of actual living human beings.

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Tacking towards freedom? Bringing journeys out of slavery into dialogue with contemporary migration

Cited by 9 publications

References 35 publications

Multinational enterprises’ narratives about and approaches to modern slavery: an exploratory study

Multinational enterprises’ narratives about and approaches to modern slavery: an exploratory study

Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona

Crossing the Binaries of Mobility Control: Agency, Force and Freedom

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