ABSTRACT
The “war on terror” and the “war on trafficking”, two seemingly separate initiatives, have become interwoven in recent years and conspire to castigate Muslim majority countries as sites of depravity, difference and danger, fueling Islamophobic rhetoric about the “clash of civilizations”. Both discourses are raced, classed and gendered, producing distinct tropes of victims and villains, while the intersection of these two “wars” presents a confluence of moral panics, or public anxieties pertaining to “immoral” behavior, about sexuality, Islam and immigration). The discourses about trafficking and terror are becoming hegemonic and inescapable. More disconcertingly, these discourses are resulting in a series of policies and sometimes militarized responses that are hurting vulnerable populations globally. Each “war” seeks to marshal rhetoric about the other to further bolster its cause and justify the creation of harsh policies suffused with overt condescension. Rhetoric about race, class and sexuality feeds into the construction of a “traffickingandterror” paradigm. Similar to ways in which the trafficking discourse has wedded women and children to the point where the turn of phrase has entered the lexicon as “womenandchildren”, so too do we see a similar suturing of trafficking and terror to the extent where the two are seen as one, with discursive slippages between the two becoming de rigueur. The analysis is foregrounded in a combination of ethnography, discourse analysis and policy review.
