Contribution short abstract:

This presentation highlights how the Human Trafficking framework perpetuates the coercive labour exploitation of marginalised groups. We argue that, by focusing on individual perpetrators, the framework overlooks the regulations and structures that enable employers to exploit these groups.

Contribution long abstract:

The primary tool in the global response to the persistent problem of coercive labour exploitation over the past two decades is the Human Trafficking legal framework, following the adoption of the United Nations Palermo Protocol in 2000. However, critical literature on the Human Trafficking framework highlights that it has produced racialised, classed, and gendered representations of perpetrators and victims, who then become the targets of surveillance, prosecution, and often unsolicited rescue missions designed to combat Human Trafficking. Our aim in this presentation is to illustrate how the Human Trafficking framework perpetuates the structural and institutional conditions that enable the coercive labour exploitation of historically marginalised groups, including women and those in economically precarious situations. Notably, the Human Trafficking framework pays more attention to individual acts that lure and subject people to coercive labour arrangements, while overlooking or doing little to address the regulations and formal structures that permit employers and industries to exploit marginalised groups through coercive labour practices. This presentation focuses on Cameroonians in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and the anti-Human Trafficking campaigns in Cameroon. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cameroon and the United Arab Emirates between 2015 and 2024, exploring the trafficking of Cameroonian nationals.