City Research Online

Abstract

Drawing on interview material with Beth, a Nigerian woman with experience of trafficking to the UK, this paper interrogates the future politics of British anti-modern slavery policy. I argue that the political time of Britain’s approach to modern slavery figures the so-called modern slave as a pre-political, temporally suspended “infantile citizen” (Berlant 1997), whose expected entry into the public sphere provides the moral justification for territorial and cultural borders. I then discuss how the spectre of embodied identity brings this into crisis, as the non-White and the non-Western pose a specific threat to the nation by revealing its foundational violence. Through my conversation with Beth, I bring these processes of infantilization and criminalization into sharp relief. In so doing, I reveal the temporal impossibility of anti-slavery rhetoric, which positions the modern slave in a state of “animated suspension” (Berlant 2011).

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads