‘The Life of Individuals as well as of Nations’: International Law and the League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Governmentalities

Abstract

This paper will address an often-neglected agenda of the much-derided League of Nations: its 'social' and 'technical' works. These targeted human security through regulating different forms of international mobility, including the fight against trafficking in women and children. The League used conventions and conferences to commit nation-states, in a legal model, to standardized anti-trafficking measures. It also, however, worked to educate and inform states, voluntary organizations, and the general public about the nature of trafficking and the ways of combating it. The latter techniques are here interpreted using Foucault's governmentality writings, which encourage us to look beyond the juridical epistemologies of international relations and international law, but not beyond the interlacing of laws and norms, here explored through interwar League governmentalities.

International Legislation on White Slavery and Anti-Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century

“…The main function of the 1921 Convention was to amplify and strengthen the 1904 Agreement and the 1910 Convention discussed in the previous section (ibid). Replacing the loaded term "white slavery" with the more neutral term "traffic" marks a shift to a more nuanced understanding of trafficking, and as Stephen Legg has argued, the League of Nations thereby played a key role in "de-racializing the 'white slave trade' rhetoric" (Legg 2012b).…”

Christian Marriage between Tradition and Modernity: Catholic and Protestant Women and Marriage Education in Late Colonial Cameroon, 1939–1960

“…33 This meant Africans in the territory had the opportunity to engage more deeply with Christianity in the early twentieth century than in most of France's other colonies, since the French territorial government was legally bound by the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to accept assistance from all religious institutions seeking to establish missions. 34 As a result, a wide range of international missionary societies expanded their influence during French rule, of which the most prominent were the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, the French Protestant Mission and the Foreign Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the USA 35 By the end of the Second World War, the territory was home to roughly five hundred thousand African Catholics and nearly two hundred thousand Protestants. 36 Believers were led by growing numbers of indigenous priests and pastors, as well as over 7,000 African catechists among the Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist and Presbyterian churches.…”

Sorting victims from workers

“…Trafficking is defined in international law as:the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. (United Nations, 2000 Article 3, paragraph (a))As Stephen Legg’s (2009, 2012) careful genealogical research on the evolution of law and policy related to trafficking for sexual exploitation in the 20th century has illustrated, earlier moral panics around ‘the white slave trade’ were intimately related to the attempted extension of European power through the strategies of the League of Nations (precursor of the United Nations) and national governments, which both reinforced and disrupted scalar hierarchies of colonialism. The contemporary significance of modern slavery and trafficking as political and policy issues is associated with a flurry of legislative and juridical activity in the last several decades and the efflorescence of civil society groups and campaigns worldwide, with similarly contested scalar politics involving debates about criminalization, international legal norms, colonialism and feminism (Doezema, 2001; Kotiswaran, 2014; Lee, 2006).…”

“…That ‘modern slavery’ is framed as an international problem, but one requiring national and local action, chimes both with broader contemporary policy discourses on trafficking and with the historical treatment of sex trafficking during the 20th century (Legg, 2012). The renewed focus on trafficking for sexual exploitation and (to a lesser extent) forced labour from the 1990s in countries like the UK has thus reflected, but also shaped, the evolution of international legal norms and instruments as well as national regulatory regimes and their local implementation.…”