Movements to Combat Sex-Trafficking: The Social Construction of a Global Problem and Its Solutions

Problems of Agentic-Centric Approaches: Bringing in Institutionalized Culture

Agentic constructivist approaches conceptualize actors with agency effectively creating a norm in a tightly coupled causal line. ¹¹ In international studies, political sociology, global governance, and related fields, there has been increasing criticism of linear, actor-centered interpretation of norms, by problematizing actorhood and agency and the singular norm, often in terms of the agent-structure relationship. ¹² One line of criticism and theoretical development conceptualizes actors and their practices in the context of social interactions, encompassing relational and actor-network theories, with agency emerging out of social interactions. ¹³ In contrast, sociological institutionalists criticize the common understanding of agency as an axiomatic quality of the actor by theorizing that institutions constitute actors, agency, and situated interactions. ¹⁴

We build on these developments by bringing culture in more explicitly: actors, practices, interactions, and relationship networks are embedded in institutionalized cultural structures. By embedded we mean that one cannot interpret actors (including states and international organizations), their intentions, desires, and actions without understanding the (international) institutionalized cultural order in which they find themselves. ¹⁵ Rooted in anthropology and sociology, this line of theorizing is traceable to analyses of cultural structures as a system of classifications and rules constituting categoric boundaries including actor identities. ¹⁶ Bourdieu furthers this line with his formulation of ‘structuring structures’, although with his concept of habitus he retains a socialized actor that carries those structures with them. ¹⁷ Lamont and Fournier in a collection of essays explore how symbolic distinctions are created and how they structure practices. ¹⁸ In critical International Relations theory, Epstein has argued that we need to bring language more prominently into our analyses. ¹⁹ In a study of the international anti-whaling movement, Epstein refers to the ‘structure of meanings and values’ as the nomos, following Bourdieu, and argues that the discourse of ‘speaking subjects’ simultaneously constitutes the actor’s position and actions strategies. ²⁰ Elsewhere, she argues ‘power . . . is lodged in the categories undergirding an issue-area of international politics’. ²¹ We use the term ‘embedded’ to encompass these ways in which institutional structures constitute, frame, and organize actors and their action strategies.

Thus, actors and their practices are embedded in networks of social interactions and relationships, and importantly actors, practices, and relational networks are embedded in cultural structures, accessible and observable in situated discourse. The distinction between embeddedness in social relations and in cultural structures can be explicated through two aspects of the different usages of institution and culture. First, in IR and other social sciences, ‘institutionalism’ conceptualizes institutions as organizations of roles and norms that govern interactions and function as incentive structures for individual actors. ²² A cultural approach argues that this is incomplete. What we refer to as cultural institutionalism conceptualizes institutions as cultural structures. The World Bank commonly referred to as an international institution is an organization whereas ‘private property’ and ‘development’ are institutions – cultural categories institutionalized throughout the world. The World Bank through its policies institutionalizes private property and development in particular ways thereby reproducing power relations, shaping actor interests and desires and also their interactions and relationships, whether or not a particular organizational policy is effective. Second, culture is not equated to actor preferences and values. Following diverse theoretical developments in the last 60 years, the consensus is that identities and rules are part of a structured ‘order of things’ that include situated strategized practices woven into narratives. ²³

Cultural institutionalism highlights the cultural aspects of sociological institutionalism: institutional structures are cultural in nature, constituting actor identities, and the rationales for actions, what Foucault refers to as the rationalities of institutions. The cultural aspects of institutions reflect broader culture, but in being built into institutional rules and procedures the broader cultural aspects are more concrete and particular. Hironaka refers to this as a ‘workspace’. ²⁴ Similarly, Merry, in her study of human rights activism against gender violence, analyzes the ways in which ‘transnational social spaces’ bring actors together ‘in a transnational setting that has its own norms, values, and cultural practices’. ²⁵ Moreover, an institution might be out of sync with the broader culture whether because it has resisted change or because it is pioneering change. What this perspective adds beyond an actor-centric approach is that it directs attention to how the institutional context not only functions as an incentive structure for actors, but also constitutes actors and interests, frames issues, and channels change. ²⁶

Analyzing the cultural contexts of international actors and norms connects with formulations of global culture. ²⁷ Merry conceptualizes a global culture that produces and is produced by institutions that establish spaces for the construction of human rights and that is translated (and modified) into local vernaculars. ²⁸ Although not using the term culture, scholars identify constitutive international structures; for example, Reus-Smit theorizes a constitutional structure of international society consisting of shared beliefs about states’ moral purposes, sovereignty, and procedural justice. ²⁹ Alasuutari documents how world cultural models of nation-state policies are adopted by national parliaments through domesticating them – making them consistent with national narratives. ³⁰ Sociological institutionalists have conceptualized a world culture broadly as instrumental rationalism that orients actors to instrumental means characterized by metrics of efficiency, technologies, professional experts, and individualism (e.g. human rights), and narratives of progress. ³¹ Above all, this rationalism and narratives of progress drive actors to identify social problems and their solutions.

Theoretical developments have tended to focus on the embeddedness of actors, but norms also are embedded in an order of things, which highlights another problem with agentic-centric approaches: research commonly is organized around a singular norm that marks the intention and success of the actor. While a singular norm might for analytical purposes be identified, it cannot be analyzed adequately apart from its institutional context. ³² There is a long history of critiquing the concept of a singular norm as imprecise or abstracted from everyday life. ³³ More recently, Pratt argues that IR scholarship would benefit from ‘de-reifying’ or focusing less on the singular norm and more on their relations to other norms; their arrangements; configurations; and value orientations. ³⁴ This echoes other scholars who have used the concepts of ‘norm bundle’ or ‘norm cluster’ in international relations. ³⁵ Regime complexity is another approach that has showed anti-trafficking activism and policies being affected by different issue areas such as migration and labor. ³⁶ Thus actor-centric models have difficulties because norms are not just related to other norms in clusters, or bundles, but also that norms are associated with different issue areas.

This complexity also involves different meanings and frames. Jurkovich writes that ‘for the most part constructivist scholarship in the field of IR speaks of a “norm” as a single concept, without qualifiers’ and it assumes that a norm is shared across actors and contexts with little ambiguity. ³⁷ Jurkovich explicates distinct aspects of the cultural-structural complex surrounding a norm such as, ‘oughtness’, types of actors (identities), and types of actions. ³⁸ The different international issue areas operate on various meanings of the norms in question. This can involve cooperative interactions and mutual reinforcement, but it can also create contention over how to define a global social problem, the normative solution, and who has authority over the management of the solution. ³⁹

Promoting a norm thus involves promoting a cultural package – an order of things that includes identities, scripts, and other norms. This is what we refer to when we say that a norm is embedded. Thus, one cannot change a norm without changing other aspects of the culture, and one does so within the given cultural reality. For example, using the present case, movements might work to define sex-trafficking so as to eradicate it, but they do so by strategizing lines of action within the institutionalized culture. If sex-trafficking is defined in terms of threats to national gene pools and security, it is difficult to formulate a norm based on identifying the trafficked person as a victim. Moreover, whether the person trafficked is identified as a person, laborer, woman, or child and whether trafficking is associated with sex, affect what norms if any might be formulated to regulate or ban the practice. ⁴⁰ In other words, these identities and norms inform the social construction of a global problem and its solutions.

Movements often focus on these aspects, attempting to change the assumed cultural reality of targeted actors and institutions. In his comparative study of national parliamentary debates, Alasuutari formulated this process as ‘epistemic governance’ whereby actors in situated contentious debates attempt to influence the ontologies governing the situation. ⁴¹ Epstein shows that the anti-whaling movement’s success was not because of persuasion but because it changed the ontological categories in which actors such as states strategized their practices. ⁴² In the present study, as long as sex is viewed in terms of groups (whether traditional kin groups or modern national gene pools) and as long as women are defined predominantly in terms of social roles revolving around reproduction, it is difficult to recognize sexual violence against women seen as individuals and to formulate rules against it. ⁴³ The anti-trafficking movements early in the 20th century contested and eventually changed institutionalized cultural definitions (from seeing sex-trafficking as a threat to national gene pools to seeing it as a threat to individual women) more than effecting any singular norm.

A Cultural Institutional Model

Running throughout these theoretical conversations is the sociological dialectic that actors create cultural institutions which constitute actors – their identities, desires, goals, and practices. Precisely how to formulate this dialectic commonly is caught up in the agent-structure polemic (often associated with culture/institution vs. practice), with calls to favor one over the other. This polemic tends to distract from the task of historical analysis of how change results from the intertwining of actors and institutions. Emphasizing the cultural aspects of sociological institutionalism, the cultural institutionalist approach we are proposing is an integrative approach with the purpose of short-circuiting this polemic. It directs the researcher to conceptualize how this dialectic unfolds in practice in institutionally situated interactions. To move from this meta-theoretical level to a more concrete model, we draw on the recent work by Hironaka who theorizes this intertwining in terms of international institutions as ‘workspaces’. ⁴⁴ It is well known that IGOs provide arenas in which states negotiate and form coalitions and provide platforms for various actors. As institutional workspaces though, international organizations are more than merely arenas for fully formed rational actors. Institutional workspaces constitute actors and provide cultural and social elements for defining and thereby constructing problems and their solutions. ⁴⁵ They bring diverse actors together around an issue area over which they dispute, negotiate, and collaborate. Workspaces provide much agency for actors to construct problems and solutions, and simultaneously they restrict and channel the direction of change. The concept of workspaces brings into focus the dialectic of social relations within an organized space embedded in institutional culture, consistent with Merry’s conceptualization of transnational social space. ⁴⁶

In theorizing how workspaces work, Hironaka takes on an additional problem with agentic constructivism – the assumption that actors successfully produce an intended norm in a tightly coupled causation. Hironaka labels this a ‘smoking gun’ model and contrasts it with what she terms a ‘bee swarm’ model. ⁴⁷ The effects of institutional structures and actors occur in messy, indirect ways through weak mechanisms in which the intentions of actors and outcomes are loosely coupled. ⁴⁸ In analyses of international environmental movements, she shows that while the efforts of any one actor or movement could not be determined as ‘successful’, the swarm of actors in international workspaces produced substantial change.

A tightly coupled conception of particular actors and an unembedded singular norm furthermore organizes research around a binary outcome: either intentional actors are successful in establishing an intended norm, or not. Failure is defined often implicitly in the literature as states failing to adopt or internalize a singular norm. ⁴⁹ Yet, many attempts to bring about change have mixed outcomes or otherwise fail in this short-term binary sense, but such ‘failures’ often affect the institutional context for subsequent action and eventual ‘success’. Social change might not result in a singular norm being internalized by nation-states, but it can involve the institutionalization of moral categories and new identities. Early anti-trafficking movements that brought about change in the framing of trafficking and later movements that came to define the individual person as the victim (and not groups) but with no clear norm outlawing trafficking would in these terms be viewed as failures even though they brought about broad institutional change. For example, scholars agree that the 1949 UN convention on anti-sex-trafficking did not result in the UN as an organization or states implementing it, but as we will see it institutionalized definitions of trafficking that were no small accomplishment and that had subsequent effects. Moreover, success marked by establishing a norm that is adopted by states involves myriad aspects from how the problem is framed to the particular solution to varieties and degrees of implementation, some of which might work at cross-purposes with the intent of the norm ⁵⁰ – as we will see with Palermo.

In Figure 1, we illustrate in simplified fashion a model that constructs theoretical explanations of social change based on a tightly coupled causation: intentional actors bring about an intended singular norm.

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Figure 1.

Tightly coupled actor-norm model.

Most scholars in practice use a more complex version of this basic model, such as the norm life cycle model pioneered by Finnemore and Sikkink presented in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

Adaptation of the norm life cycle model.

In contrast, a cultural institutional approach builds theoretical interpretations based on conceptualizing the interplay between institutions and actors which results in social change through weak connections between particular actors and particular outcomes (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Loosely coupled cultural institutional model.

Hironaka conceptualizes this interplay as a ‘bee swarm’. ⁵² Each individual action of particular actors is a bee sting, which may or may not have significant effects, but taken together over the years and across settings there is a swarm of actions that through loosely coupled and weak connections produce change. Figure 4 presents a more detailed depiction of institutional workspaces and interactions and loosely coupled effects through weak mechanisms.

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Figure 4.

Cultural institutional model detail.

The cultural institutional model contextualizes the achievements of particular actors who were proximately instrumental in bringing about change and includes and elevates the many actors across time and contexts, who otherwise might be overlooked, as contributing a ‘bee sting’ that was part of a ‘swarm’ that brought about global social change. ⁵³

Implications of the Cultural Institutional Model

Cultural institutionalism is an integrative perspective or paradigm that is useful in bypassing either/or polemics such as actor versus structure by directing attention and analysis to the interplay between institutions and actors. It carries empirical implications, distinct from actor-centric ones, for how the intertwining of actors and institutions plays out; these guide our historical analysis. The general guiding implication is that actors and norms are embedded in institutions. Accordingly, we do not frame our analysis in terms of a singular norm but rather ask how a global problem and its solutions are identified and defined in institutional-historic contexts. We delineate several particular implications for patterns that actor-centric theories likely would miss, that we expect to observe, and that we assess in our analysis of the history of anti-sex-trafficking movements.

The United Nations

In the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promoted cultural categories of universalistic individual rights, generally benefiting global economic development and women’s rights movements which favored universal criminalization of prostitution. ⁶⁷ In 1944, the IAF and the IB collaborated to revive the 1937 Draft Convention, encouraging the United Nations to take it up. ⁶⁸ It informed the preamble to the UN’s 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others which sought to abolish prostitution and trafficking universally. ⁶⁹ The 1949 Convention deemed that prostitution and traffic in persons were ‘incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and endanger the welfare of the individual, family, and community’ stating:

Article 1: The Parties to the present Convention agree to punish any person who, to gratify the passions of another:

(1) Procures, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person, even with the consent of that person;

(2) Exploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person. ⁷⁰

Although newly independent post-colonial states signed the 1949 Convention, the United States and many European states marginalized it and did not sign. The UN struggled to create an effective system for gathering information and monitoring compliance of member countries. ⁷¹ Relatively few countries supplied requested reports, allowing for the claim that trafficking was uncommon and thus not a priority. ⁷² Scholars agree that after the 1949 Convention there were decades of ‘silence’ regarding sex-trafficking. ⁷³ Scholarship using agentic constructivism interprets this as failure, with some defining it as a failed norm cascade and internalization that gets ‘resurrected’ later, while others simply refer to the norm becoming ‘dormant’. ⁷⁴

There are several reasons for this period of silence, and it is not unreasonable to call this a failure; however, a cultural institutionalist perspective suggests that as an institution, the UN 1949 Convention was part of a major cultural shift that established the basis for future work. Moreover, the reasons for this silence contributed to future success. It is necessary to move beyond the consensual interpretation and see that in fact much happened even if unrelated to and in the short-term distracting from sex trafficking as a social problem but which in the long-term were factors in renewed mobilization and change.

Two factors came to dominate this early cold-war period: economic development and human rights. Economic development became the overriding mandate for states. The Bretton Woods system imposed particular models of development on less developed countries, and movements in the Third World engaged these directives. In a way, any new policy priority would have to engage development or be marginalized. At the same time, human rights grew in importance, evidenced by the burgeoning of INGOs marking the emergence of global civil society that institutionalized individualism. ⁷⁵ It commonly is thought that Western core states imposed human rights discourse on the rest of the world; yet, empirical evidence suggests that during the 1950s and early 1960s powerful Western states human rights discourse did not differ in degree from other regions but focused on liberal economic rights. ⁷⁶ Regarding sex-trafficking, DoCarmo documents that capitalist core states still were oriented to old institutional forms such as security and white slavery. ⁷⁷ Less-developed states pressed human rights, but largely around post-colonial issues and apartheid. ⁷⁸ The non-aligned movement that emerged in the Global South in the 1950s was preoccupied with political independence movements and economic development.

Women’s movements pressing for women’s rights flourished in the Global North with a focus on equality, while activists in the Global South focused more on development and local empowerment. International women’s movements led by Global North voices focused on issues of equality and did not pursue anti-sex-trafficking. ⁷⁹ The Commission for the Status of Women (CSW) established in 1946 by the UN’s Economic and Social Council did not take up the issue. By the 1960s an international movement against female genital cutting/mutilation led by the Global North gained strength but was not consistently framed in human rights discourse or violence against women until later. ⁸⁰

Unlike other treatments of this period a cultural institutionalist analysis draws attention to the expansive activism in distinct issue areas that developed diverse cultural elements that became part of the international institutional landscape some of which hindered anti-sex-trafficking mobilization in the immediate term but which facilitated future movements: the 1949 Convention, sex-trafficking defined as a human right issue, women’s rights, women’s empowerment, violence against persons, and development. In the next section we argue that the anti-sex-trafficking movements in the 1970s are interpretable based on these distant indirect and unintentional events that established institutional contexts and actor agency.

International Women’s Movement, 1970s and 1980s

The various elements and activities did not have to produce eventual change, which is historically contingent, but they appear to have come together through several factors including the linking of women’s rights and development, the UN Decade for Women 1976–86, CEDAW – Article 6; and the publication of Kathleen Barry’s book in 1979.

Berkovitch documents that in this period women’s rights were integrated with economic development, exemplified by the overlap of the Second Decade for Development and the Decade for Women, 1976–85. This both mainstreamed women’s rights and reinforced the priorities of the women’s movement in the Global South. At the same time, the UN Decade for Women, the 1979 UN CEDAW, and the CSW broadened the scope of women’s issues. Merry described CEDAW as a ‘transnational social space where actors come together’ and CEDAW monitoring as a ‘powerful site of cultural production’. ⁸¹ The culture produced is a transnational culture constituting spaces such as CEDAW which incorporate and bring together locally situated actor. ⁸² In present terms, they are international workspaces for a range of international women’s activists and provide the institutional context for the revival and formulation of anti-sex-trafficking. In such contexts, differences between Global North and South are not uniformly hindrances but are part of the dynamics pushing the movement forward.

At the same time, activists such as Kathleen Barry forcefully pressed the issue. Barry’s book Female Sexual Slavery published in the year CEDAW was adopted, was influential in reasserting the issue of trafficking and reformulating it as specifically a woman’s issue. Part of its influence is attributable to its inclusion of a 1974 INTERPOL report prepared for the UN Division of Human Rights that had not been released publicly. The INTERPOL report defined traffic in accordance with previous agreements and conventions of 1904, 1910, the League’s 1933 Convention, and the UN’s 1949 Convention. ⁸³ Moreover, the League’s Trafficking in Women and Children Committee and its 1927 data report also influenced future ‘standard-setting’. ⁸⁴ Although weak and not effective, the structures in place made up the institutional landscape during the period of silence. With Barry’s use of the INTERPOL report, we see the intertwining of actor and institution: the power of systematic data and the apparatus to collect those data are both the evolution of the institutionalized culture belonging to past actors and actions and the institutional context for contemporary actors.

It is significant that CEDAW included anti-sex-trafficking Article 6: ‘States Parties shall take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of prostitution of women’. ⁸⁵ CEDAW came to reflect Global North concerns of discrimination in the workplace, gender representation, maternity leave, and access to childcare, slighting Global South concerns of violence against women – domestic violence, bodily harm, rape, and abuse. ⁸⁶ Article 6 thus is something of an anomaly in CEDAW for two reasons. First, by including trafficking, it put an issue prioritized by the Global South on the agenda of the institutional workspace, thereby establishing a new channel of discourse –violence against women – that eventually takes root in Vienna in 1993. Second, Article 6 reflects the 1949 Convention but breaks with its referencing ‘persons’ and reintroduces sex-trafficking as a woman’s issue in part through the influence of women in the Global South. Thus, this history is characterized by weak connections backward to 1949 and forward to policy developments focusing on violence against women.

Vienna Declaration and Program of Action 1993

The 1993 Vienna Declaration and Program of Action on Human Rights (hereafter Vienna 1993) showcased violence against women. It followed shortly after the CEDAW committee’s 1992 General Recommendation No. 19 to include gender-based violence in the definition of discrimination against women. In contrast to the 1949 Convention which spoke primarily of trafficking in persons, Vienna 1993 explicitly recognized sex-trafficking as an instance of violence against women. ⁸⁸ Later the same year, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, reinforcing Vienna and enhancing CEDAW. ⁸⁹ These developments articulated the issue of the crime of sex-trafficking in women with broader gender-based human rights violations and particularly violence against women including rape, sexual harassment, and exploitation; they laid the groundwork for the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women which furthered this linkage. The Vienna conference thus was a significant episodic point in any interpretative narrative.

Problems arise with a tightly coupled narrative because conceptualizing violence against women was not planned at the conference nor intentional but was emergent:

We observed in that . . . the workshops on issues related to violence against women were the most successful . . . they were the workshops where women did not divide along north-south lines, that women felt a sense of commonality and energy in the room, that there was a sense that we could do something to help each other. . . It wasn’t that we built the network in that moment. It was just the sense of that possibility. ⁹⁰

Working within actor-centric constructivism, Keck and Sikkink attribute this emergence to psychological factors: violence against women as a frame ‘caught on’ because it ‘made sense and it captured the imagination’. ⁹¹ Assuming the accuracy of this assessment, it is important to recall that such social psychological dynamics are shaped by institutionalized cultural structures – something ‘makes sense’ in a social order and context. ⁹² Norms, concepts, and policies diffuse when they fit in the institutional structures of a social setting and result in hybridity when articulating with local settings. ⁹³ In Merry’s analysis, the global culture of human rights is translated into and made active in a situated vernacular. Actor-centric approaches importantly analyze the agency of individuals such as Charlotte Bunch at Vienna, and a cultural institutionalist approach emphasizes that their agency is embedded and channeled.

Vienna and the activity leading up to it comprised international institutional workspaces within which women activists with diverse priorities came together resulting in establishing violence against women as a constitutive frame. By defining sex-trafficking as a problem of violence against women, Vienna 1993 marks two large steps from mid-century: sex-trafficking is a woman’s issue and it is violence. The cultural institutionalist interpretation, based on the intertwining of institutions and actors effecting change through weak connections often in unintended, episodic ways, highlights the continuity of the actions of myriad actors and not just the proximate actors within an episode.

Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 1995

The articulation of violence against women and sex-trafficking was further institutionalized during the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 which consistently labeled trafficking in women and forced prostitution as violence against women. It referenced the UN 1949 declaration, recommending that it be ‘reviewed and strengthened’. ⁹⁴ The CSW worked to implement 12 critical areas of concern into Beijing’s Platform for Action, one being violence against women. The Beijing Platform for Action adopted three strategic objectives; the first two (D.1 and D.2) are to take actions to prevent and eliminate violence against women and to study the causes and the effectiveness of measures to combat violence against women. The third strategic objective is D.3: ‘Eliminate trafficking in women and assist victims of violence due to prostitution and trafficking’. ⁹⁵ The Beijing Declaration in general and strategic objective D.3 in particular firmly established the elimination of sex trafficking as violence against women.

Gender Mainstreaming and Bureaucratization

The Beijing Declaration and Platform of 1995 was also significant for promoting women more broadly within all UN bodies. It contains language that connects sex trafficking to forced labor, drug and arms trafficking, and international organized crime, and it appeals for strengthening enforcement authorities. The general effect was gender mainstreaming: the call to include a gender perspective in all policy areas that became a mandate within the UN for managing agencies. ⁹⁶ It resulted in organizational and bureaucratic changes in anti-sex-trafficking involving several agencies. The Beijing follow-up report of the Secretary-General gives an intimation of the changes required:

The High Commissioner has identified trafficking in women and children for purposes of sexual exploitation as a priority issue. . . . Cooperation will be sought with the Centre for International Crime Prevention at the United Nations Office at Vienna to cover action to combat international trafficking in women and children. Both the Division and the Office of the High Commissioner will contribute to the study on the criminal aspects of trafficking in human beings, which is being prepared by the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute on behalf of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention. ⁹⁷

Gender mainstreaming and the prominence of bureaucratic management illustrate the difficulty in labeling an outcome as a success or a failure because they have mixed effects. Arguably, anti-sex-trafficking policy is strengthened because it is incorporated into other anti-trafficking operations such as immigrant smuggling, money laundering, drug trade, and trafficking in weapons. ⁹⁸ At the same time, implementing gender mainstreaming in all policy areas tends to blur the focus on anti-sex-trafficking as a violence against women issue and shifts advocacy from grassroots women organizations to bureaucrats and technocrats. ⁹⁹ Gender mainstreaming unraveled the articulation of the issues of sex trafficking and violence against women – sex trafficking was framed as transnational organized crime, rather than gender violence.

Palermo Protocol 2000

This shift in anti-sex-trafficking was profoundly affected by international regimes in migration, labor, and human rights, which had distinctive approaches and meanings not framed by gendered violence. The shift was formalized bureaucratically with the Palermo Protocol (the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children), which relocated anti-sex-trafficking from the original women-oriented organizations and agencies to the auspices of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime. On the one hand, this bureaucratization strengthened the institutionalization of anti-sex-trafficking and the likelihood of authorities taking enforcement seriously. On the other hand, it institutionalized the reframing of anti-sex-trafficking which becomes one of many crimes any agency must consider. ¹⁰⁰ It promulgated new definitions and language.

‘Trafficking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. ¹⁰¹

The Palermo Protocol’s definition is broader than Vienna and Beijing as it returns to the 1949 language of ‘person’ and away from ‘women’. It also groups sex trafficking with other types of human trafficking (e.g. migrant smuggling) and trafficking more broadly such as drug and weapon trafficking. The disassociation of sex-trafficking from violence against women is stark. For example, the phrase ‘violence against women’ is never mentioned in the Palermo Protocol. The words ‘violence’ and ‘rape’ are never used. ‘Sexual exploitation’ and ‘prostitution’ are stated once (in the above excerpt) and never mentioned again. The Palermo Protocol does not explicitly mention the historical roots of how trafficking was defined as discrimination against women in Article 6 of CEDAW. Additionally, the word ‘women’ is only used 8 times in the 10-page document and always in the phrase ‘especially women and children’ as seen in the title. There is no section of the document dedicated to women-specific concerns of human trafficking. Finally, the focus on crime makes the language surrounding the attention to victims much thinner than the Beijing Declaration. For instance, the latter calls for ‘actions to be taken’ including addressing root factors such as tackling the industry of sex tourism and refers to an array of pro-active rehabilitation and healing initiatives. ¹⁰² Palermo is less action-oriented and rather suggests state parties ‘consider implementing measures’ to assist with recovery. ¹⁰³ The discourse used in previous international documents clearly shifts under the Office of Drugs and Crime.

Was the aftermath of Beijing with gender mainstreaming and bureaucratization culminating in the Palermo Protocol a success or failure? Palermo led to a cascade of international agreements and state legislation. It was successful in empowering anti-labor trafficking efforts in addition to sex-trafficking. Yet, hand-in-hand with gender mainstreaming it had mixed effects and unraveled the articulation of sex-trafficking from violence against women, arguably a setback. Success or failure? The reality is more complicated, and this is the point: any theoretical approach needs to take this complexity into account through interpretative narratives that eschew binary labels. It is imperative to understand not only the cultural institutional contexts (the immediate workspaces) of the actors but also the broader world institutional contexts.

The history of the anti-sex-trafficking movement suggests that the Palermo Protocol cannot be viewed as an end point. We introduced Palermo as such to dramatize that the historical analysis shows it to be neither a clear success or failure nor a definitive end point. It is not the intended culmination of the short-term narrative (CEDAW, Vienna) let alone the 100-year history, nor does the history stop with it. Instead, the lead up to Palermo, Palermo itself, and its aftermath illustrate the messy twists and turns and ongoing intertwining of actors and institutional contexts that we attempt to understand.

Actors and Norms Are Embedded in Cultural Institutions

Actor-centric theories rely on actor agency as the driving force for socio-political change, and they assume tight connections between intentional actors and intended outcomes. They make strong assumptions about actor rationality and efficacy and direct our attention to short time frames and to prominent figures proximate to a focal outcome, commonly a singular norm. This approach is problematic given that actors and norms are neither autonomous nor singular but rather are embedded in institutional structures shaped by prior often temporally distant actors. In contrast, a cultural institutionalist perspective emphasizes this embeddedness. Using this perspective to guide our analysis of the long-term history of the anti-sex-trafficking movement, we have identified and modeled the intertwining of intentional actors and the contextual effects of institutions: how institutions constitute and direct actor agency through which actors can produce new institutional elements. Similarly, normative goals are not the same throughout the history of the anti-sex-trafficking movements and any identifiable norm cannot be analyzed separately from its institutional context – from the order of things in which meanings are constructed. The anti-sex-trafficking movement was created during an era of competing INGOs; evolved under the League of Nations, the early United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; setting the context for the Decade for Women, CEDAW, the Vienna Declaration, and the Beijing Declaration amongst others. Exemplary actors such as Kathleen Barry were empowered after decades of effort, organization and institutionalization, and the emergent results often were unintended. The power of a cultural institutional approach is seen in that if we began our analysis in the 1970s with the prominent activists and major international successes, we would have a limited understanding of global governance change.

Multidimensional Change and Institutional Effects

Global social change is multidimensional involving definitions, frames, goals, and obligations that define the social problem and possible solutions. Cultural institutionalism places these institutional structures as central to any analysis and identifies patterns that would have been missed otherwise. The present study shows that the early history of anti-trafficking involved cultural categories of social hygiene, eugenics, white slavery, and anti-immigrant sentiments. These group-centered definitions of the problem were replaced with a more individualist formulation in the 1937 Draft Convention and then in the 1949 Convention. Neither produced a norm taken up by IGOs or states. An actor-centric approach that focuses on anti-trafficking as a singular norm internalized by actors assumes binary outcomes – actors are either successful in bringing about a norm or not – and would label these changes as failures, pushing them to the margins. A cultural institutionalist approach, in contrast, drawing attention to the multidimensional nature of norms and change interprets these changes as major historical accomplishments and results in identifying connections to subsequent successes that otherwise is overlooked.

When an IGO promulgates a new definition of a problem and its solutions, when it adopts a policy or issues a resolution, it is both reflecting and affecting the broader cultural landscape. It creates an institutional workspace in which a variety of types of actors with different normative position can work on the issues. When a formal policy is adopted and states formally sign on, if neither the IGO nor states actually act on a policy, it is reasonable to view the policy as failed, especially from the point of view of social movements that have pressed for that policy. Nevertheless, once established, these new institutionalized elements can be taken up and reasserted. This distinction is illustrated in the UN’s 1949 Convention. Neither the UN nor the member states implemented it. Yet, its definition and framing of the problem influenced activists, the UN, and states to come together 30 years later to identify and solve the problem of sex-trafficking. Viewed in terms of institutional workspaces, the 1949 Convention institutionalized the issue as the rights of the individual person, and the subsequent innovation was the reframing in terms of the right of women in the language of CEDAW, Article 6. During the later period we see the powerful effects of the INTERPOL report published in Barry’s book as part of a loosely coupled and global institutionalized progression of how data collection and reporting practices evolved from the United Nations and the League of Nations. To reiterate, the cultural institutional perspective directs our attention to just such weak, long-term connections that actor-centric theories focusing on direct, intentional links would miss.

International Issue Area Complexity

The institutional model, and in particular Hironaka’s concept of a bee swarm of distinct influences, looks beyond those actors who explicitly identify as working against sex-trafficking to understand the effects of weak connections. The revival of attention to sex-trafficking, whether in terms of Barry’s work or CEDAW, did not happen out of thin air. The successes of women’s movements in the Global North, the expansion of human rights discourse led by the Global South, the burgeoning of INGOs worldwide, the convergence of women’s rights and development in the UN and mainstreamed in development IGOs, and Global South women’s movements all contributed to this revival. Moreover, the Palermo Protocol was in part the result of gender mainstreaming and bureaucratization that consequentially disconnected sex-trafficking from its association with violence against women and instead categorized sex-trafficking as transnational organized crime. This in turn handed responsibility and influence over to the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, the International Office of Migration, and the International Labor Organization. By understanding better the cultural institutional effects that can work at cross-purposes, we are in a better position to understand the current controversies even among activists surrounding anti-sex-trafficking.

Institutional Workspaces in Episodic Change

Long-term change in global governance is episodic in character. Actor-centric theories draw our attention to a particular episode, guiding the research to identify a successful outcome and construct a linear story that directly connects it to proximately prior intentional actions. Although insightful, this approach misses the episodic character of change and the connections from one episode to another and thus the need for a longer-term interpretative narrative. Even in the short time frame of a particular episode, these approaches have difficulty interpreting emergent and unintended qualities of change. A major contribution of our analysis is a compelling narrative of the social forces converging in a particular episode, illustrated by Vienna 1993 and subsequently Palermo 2000.

We use the concepts of institutional workspaces and the swarm of myriad actors to capture these dynamics leading up to Vienna 1993. International conferences organized by IGOs comprise a time-framed institutional workspace often defining episodes. There are various intentional actors pursuing their interests and goals, often at odds with each other. The tensions between international frames and local ones, between the different priorities of women from the Global North and South were present in Vienna. The conference’s defining sex-trafficking as violence against women was an emergent outcome and illustrates the intertwining of actors and institutions and the bee swarm dynamic: the outcome could not have happened without agentic actors pursuing particular goals, but the outcome cannot be tightly linked to any given autonomous actor. Neither was the outcome a singular norm, but rather a definition and a set of solutions.

The episodic character of change and the problem of defining a singular end point is illustrated in our analysis of the disparate forces converging at Palermo 2000. Palermo reframed sex-trafficking in terms of criminal trafficking generally and moved authority over the problem and solutions to crime agencies involving the bureaucratization of solving the problem through anti-crime. While in many ways successful, in other ways it comprises yet another twist and turn in the continuing history of anti-sex-trafficking.