ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the revival of the ILO’s efforts to govern forced labour, focusing in particular on the ways in which residualist understandings of forced labour have remained embedded in the ILO’s approach to forced labour. The chapter opens by situating the revival of forced labour at the ILO and briefly outlining the ILO’s revived agenda on forced labour. The remainder of the chapter then traces out some ways in which these assumptions have played out in two different projects. First, it examines a project dealing with ‘traditional slavery’ in Niger. I show how the reliance of these interventions on the concept of ‘traditional slavery’ has tended to obscure the linkages between transformations in existing forms of unfree labour and the process of structural adjustment and neoliberalization. But at the same time, the politics of governing forced labour has been rather more complex than this critique implies, with ongoing struggles over the shape of the postcolonial state playing a critical role in shaping and delimiting the practice of ILO interventions. Second, it examines ILO efforts to govern child trafficking in West Africa, focusing on a major regional project called ‘Combatting the Trafficking of Children for Labour Exploitation in West and Central Africa’, (referred to by the French acronym LUTRENA) and its successors. Major components of the ILO’s interventions have entailed promoting ‘income generasting activities’ in vulnerable communities as well as promoting more effective policing of trafficking through interactions with security forces in the region.
