Prabha Kotiswaran, ed., Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017)

As NEIL GAIMAN admonished: "the law is a blunt instrument." Transnational scholar Peer Zumbansen notes that violence and vulnerability accompany the law. Still, discourses of human trafficking --popular, political, and scholarly--tend to focus on the law, almost invariably on criminality and enforcement.

Prabha Kotiswaran's latest contribution to much-needed scholarship on trafficking, forced labour, and contemporary slavery readily acknowledges the "sheer ineffectiveness of anti-trafficking law." (6) Blunt in airing a usually unstated anxiety in anti-trafficking work, Kotiswaran identifies the paucity of outcomes of anti-trafficking law as fundamentally problematic to its continued prioritization. But are these not statements against interest for a book on human trafficking law? No. Kotiswaran's project is to "decentre" (7) trafficking from the law.

An edited work, Kotiswaran's goal is to produce a volume of "socio-legal" (5) analysis of the law and policy related to trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery. To navigate the "chaos" (6) of the anti-trafficking landscape that features weak institutionalization; poor direction; symbolic compliance; dysfunctional definitional discord; and the conflation of trafficking with both slavery and forced labour, Kotiswaran strives to articulate a transnational legal lens beyond criminal and international law approaches and traditional global geographies.

Kotiswaran's formulation of a pluralist transnational law approach provides a valuable analytical tool that encompasses a multiplicity of the tense and impactful factors--e.g. public and private legal process; informal and "soft law"' sources; and action by non-state actors--that simultaneously cause, reproduce, and combat human trafficking. In so doing, Kotiswaran moves beyond simply referencing the tensions inherent in anti-trafficking inquiry, acknowledging--and seeking to take on --the "mess," "paradoxes," (5) and buried issues in anti-trafficking work.

To this end, Kotiswaran's book is presented in five parts. Part I provides an historical context of international law --including its difficulties--to address human trafficking. Part II offers a legal realist critique of anti-trafficking law. Part III canvasses the role and influence of non-state actors and the move of anti-trafficking regulation from government to governance. Part IV focuses on the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in producing data on trafficking and the ILO'S influence in concluding the 2014 Protocol on Forced Labour. Part V examines the political economy of labour and evaluates anti-trafficking frameworks for domestic workers. Kotiswaran concludes the book by offering an agenda for research on mobility, migration, and the potential of the law.

While intended to provide a work on trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery significant for its non-legal range, the book does primarily engage the transnational legal order and a transnational legal approach. In this way, it seems to fall somewhat short of the very ambitious extra-legal project set out in its Introduction.

The book certainly contains brilliant (re-) thinking of much of the speculative intuition that motivates human trafficking law and policy responses and data collection. However, somewhat restrictively--albeit helpfully--the book focuses on definitional issues and debates, migration, and domestic work, tending to present, if not privilege, these features as the core of the contemporary labour trafficking transnational legal order.

Also, while providing valuable insights into the law and effects of forced labour, trafficking, and slavery, the book's goal of interrogating trafficking from an interdisciplinary perspective to ensure a full critique seems not fully realized. The book succeeds in highlighting the multi-dimensional nature of trafficking, especially beyond the criminal law, and its contributors' diverse perspectives fulfill the book's stated ends of "mapping the ... paradigms" (46) of trafficking and reexamining the fundamental assumptions of trafficking law. However, a still broader and more intentionally applied interdisciplinarity and inclusion of additional theoretical perspectives--environmental, Indigenous, anti-colonial, Marxist --would have amplified the book's scope and originality, and ensured the expectations raised in its Introduction were unarguably met, if not exceeded.

In terms of methodology, while the book does include instructive case studies and ethnography in interviews recounting the experiences of trafficked workers, for the most part it employs traditional legal and policy analysis. Inclusion of more materialist, empirical, and unconventional research approaches would have made for a stronger and more innovative work.

In addition, fewer calls to action are contained in the book than expected. Concrete recommendations based on rigorous research and methodologically-sound data are greatly needed to combat trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery. Kotiswaran herself does propose an insightful agenda for future anti-trafficking research focusing on a "distributively motivated" (39) approach and calling for more legal ethnographic research.

Finally, in a book on labour, a wholesale challenge of the contemporary economic system--capitalism--is conspicuous by its absence. The book does investigate the political economy of labour and acknowledges that exploitation is a hallmark of --not an exception to--global capitalism: an enforced legal and policy system not simply an aberration perpetrated by immoral individuals. Part II of the book identifies the state's role in ensuring migrants serve neoliberal capitalism, but extra-state remedies and systemic transformation are not explored. Moreover, for Kotiswaran, rather than being exceptional or requiring transformational redress, trafficking embodies "regulatory predicaments" (7) similar those of other issues confounded by globalization. But what of the contributions to trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery of the circuits of globalized capital themselves? Even the book's articulated labour approach to anti-trafficking encompasses primarily human rights and migration issues best addressed structurally by legal remedies and law reform rather than economic reorientation. Notions of corporate social responsibility--with trade unionism as accountability--and "redemptive capitalism" are expounded, but their need not assigned to any systemic causations. Immigration controls are argued to be perhaps the "single biggest legal factor contributing to modern day slavery." (25) Qualified as a legal factor this is true. But what about the exploitation inherent in capitalism, the very structure of the relationships in which slavery manifests? In this way, Kotiswaran's book misses the opportunity to de-exceptionalize and externalize trafficking not only beyond individuals and "domestic abuses" but to capitalism itself. The abolition of slavery in the United States was not an exercise in law reform. Efforts to end slavery challenged and transformed an entire slavebased economy. Accordingly, any study of trafficking and slavery that does not expressly interrogate and challenge the fundamental basis of the free market--the exploitation inherent in capitalist labour and social relations--is incomplete.

Kotiswaran's book is still a significant contribution to re-examining the law and governance of trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery, true to its title. Its insights are very important and the book provides interdisciplinary perspectives, helpfully challenging traditional trafficking discourses from their usual legal and policy assumptions and illuminating the implication of the state.

The book is an excellent challenge to traditional narratives, data, and hubris of anti-trafficking work. However, overall its overarching transnational legal approach does seem to imply that the law--albeit not simply criminal law--can remedy trafficking and forced labour. Kotiswaran is quick to recognize this and other limitations of the book, regarding writing an inherently imperfect and "myth-making" (46) enterprise.

Given its excellent contribution to reflective, critical analysis of the fundamentals of law and human trafficking, Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery should be read by as many scholars, practitioners, and activists as possible, while transforming the global economy.

MIKE PERRY

Trent University