ABSTRACT
Just a year after the Palermo Protocol established the international legallanguage to criminalize human trafficking in 2000, the U.S. State Department set up the international monitoring system that uses statistics-particularly estimates of the total number of victims per year-to make the case for interventions to combat trafficking as a global crisis. With an expanding interest in simple quantitative variables that can be tallied and graphed, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (G/TIP) created the dominant country-by-country schema to measure compliance with this new generation of international norms and punish noncompliance.1 This
The author thanks Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill for the opportunity to participate in this collaboration. Andreas offered especially insightful feedback and cogent questions for which I am very grateful. I have been involved in field work and archival research related to this topic from 2003 to 2006 in Japan and from 2006 to 2009 in Colombia and Washington, D.C. This multi-sited research project has been funded by a Senior Research Fulbright; an Abe Fellowship from the Center for Global Partnership in Tokyo, the Social Science Research Council, and American Council of Learned Societies; the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University; the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University; the Watson Institute for International Studies; and Brown University.
