Modern Slavery and Migration: A Conversation on the Production of Invasive Figures and Racist Imaginaries

Abstract

What makes up the figure of the ‘modern slave’ and why does it appear so regularly in discussions over both climate change and migration? In this conversation, Nandita Dutta and Maurice Stierl discuss how the modern slave emerges in their respective fields of research, what political function it plays and what colonial, racial and spatial imaginaries it is embedded in. This figure is not innocent – it marks out racialised others, chaotic places ‘elsewhere’ and legitimises specific moral and political interventions, often in the name of both protection and deterrence. In this conversation, the authors point to the risk of reproducing discourses about affected groups and populations as ‘slaves’, whose ‘vulnerability’ can quickly turn into a ‘threat’ if they dare to move across borders.

Introduction

As colleagues at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University, we carry out research projects concerning the ‘production of migration’. Our shared assumption is that migration is not simply an objective reality out there but is produced through complex and often conflictual knowledge- and meaning-making practices, implicated in unequal and hierarchical relations of power. Although we have different research foci, namely climate mobilities and migrant disappearances in maritime borderzones, we noticed how the topic of modern slavery and in particular the figure of the modern slave have repeatedly appeared in both our subject areas. Given that we believe that this figure does something, thus that it has a specific function and is mobilised for particular political purposes, we decided to enter into a conversation. In our exchange, we explore how and why the modern slave emerges in our respective areas of interest, what this figure helps achieve politically, what kinds of (colonial, racial and spatial) imaginaries and rationales it is embedded in, what kinds of historical continuities it denotes and whether we may find possibilities of contestation.

Nandita Dutta: I was at a conference on climate mobilities hosted in a European city recently. A presenter whose focus was on ‘decolonising’ climate change research through centring Pacific Islanders’ lived experiences showed a performance piece where a woman stood in a coffin-sized glass box filled with water. Another young researcher described her research question as investigating if climate migrants from North Africa would end up as modern slaves in western countries. Even in their well-meaning attempts, these scholars could only read their research participants as ‘victims’ – people whose choices were either to drown in the rising sea or cross borders to escape climatic disasters, only to then get trapped in ‘modern slavery’.

It is now well established in scholarship that since migration is multi-causal, climate migration is not identifiable as a new or neat type. Moreover, people who move for environmental reasons typically move within their countries or regions, instead of crossing international borders (Boas et al., 2019). Similarly, as any labour undertaking with some degree of involuntariness, control or exploitation is labelled as modern slavery, it is hard to determine what modern slavery really is – it ends up being used as an umbrella term for different kinds of exploitative circumstances (Mende, 2019). Despite this complexity, ‘experts’ in the ‘Global North’ have been invested in fixing these ideas – climate migration and modern slavery – into incontrovertible and actionable facts. Some have even drawn tenuous connections between the two.

As the imagined figure of the climate migrant typically lacks agency, upon migration, it risks morphing into a modern slave. An emergent form of migration, thus, quickly finds itself in a relationship with modern slavery, often matchmade by knowledge producers, based on the supposed vulnerability of migrants. At the heart of both climate migration and modern slavery discourse is ‘vulnerability’. Colonial underpinnings make vulnerability of places and people (by race or gender) appear as natural rather than socio-political (Weatherill, 2024). They invisibilise histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that have created these vulnerabilities in the first place (Bhambra and Newell, 2023). Vulnerability, then, becomes the ‘grounds of legitimacy’ for ongoing coloniality (Wynter, 2003: 292). These emotionally charged imaginaries not only represent ways of thinking and talking about places and people but also co-produce them. Both climate migration and modern slavery discourses work by producing ‘sentimental tropes and figures’ meant to evoke empathy for the ‘sufferings of geographically remote strangers’ (O’Connell Davidson, 2014: 28).

In a circular sleight of hand, modern slavery is also said to be deepening the climate crisis (Bales and Sovacool, 2021; Sparks et al., 2021). The idea is that by working in brick kilns, mines, quarries, fisheries and farms, modern slaves contribute disproportionately to climate change. In the work of Bales and Sovacool (2021: 3), for example, the authors demonstrate certitude so great as to claim: ‘If modern slaves were a country, they would be the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after China and the United States.’ While the message here is that modern slavery is bad for our planet, more interesting is the manoeuvre that transforms modern slaves, hitherto recognised as victims, into villains. They may not have the agency to choose their own destinies, but they are agents of climate change. When modern slavery and climate migration enter into a marriage, the threat comes to Europe. Both these discourses depend heavily on speculative figures running into millions, people who would leave Asia and Africa for Europe (Myers, 1997). Baldwin (2013) has warned against this dual construction of the climate migrant as both threat and victim, embodying the racial politics of climate change and migration discourse. It marks the migrant as a racial other and legitimises some form of intervention, whether humanitarian measures or increased policing of borders. What it conveniently ignores is that corporations that degrade the environment and extract cheap labour in slavery-like conditions, affecting local lives and livelihoods, move rather unrestrained in a globalised, capitalist economy.

Maurice, do you notice similar interplays of victimhood and threat in the production of the figure of the modern slave in the context of cross-Mediterranean migration to Europe?

Maurice Stierl: Indeed, also in my area of research – migratory and solidarity struggles in the context of contemporary EUro ¹ -African borders – the figure of the modern slave has repeatedly appeared (Stierl and Tazzioli, 2025). In some ways, this should not surprise us. When people are on the move, seeking to transgress borders without authorisation, they often experience harrowing forms of abuse, violence and exploitation. The necropolitics underwriting EUropean and other borders engenders hardship and produces vulnerability, which, captured through word and image, fosters visual associations with historic slavery (Topak, 2024). Specifically, images of violated (Black) bodies, incarcerated in detention camps or crammed together on migrant boats, evoke associations with the enslaved during the times of the slave trade, who were shipped as ‘human cargo’ across the Atlantic by the millions.

It is precisely because of these associations that we saw a global outcry unfold in 2017, when journalists exposed how Black people, who had migrated to Libya, were being auctioned into servitude (Elbagir et al., 2017). Many commentators at the time, including African political leaders and campaigners, drew connections between the exploitation of migrants today and the history of enslavement when reacting to the scenes of the Libyan auctions. Given ‘the linkages between colonialism and forced migration across the world, and across temporal scales, from formal colonial rule to current displacement practices and regimes’ (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2022: 2), these connections can open up space to explore possible colonial and racial legacies in the contemporary regulation of borders and the exploitation of those on the move (Mayblin and Turner, 2021; Stierl, 2025). They can also prompt critical reflection on how unruly human mobilities occur in past and present, be it via historic underground railroads or migratory escape routes today (Mezzadra, 2020).

However, we commonly see how linking migration and slavery does not serve the purpose of counteracting colonial amnesia by drawing out colonial legacies and continuities. Quite the opposite is often the case. Let me give you a concrete example. In the mid-2010s, with crisis narratives concerning migration reaching unprecedented heights in Europe, we saw how politicians in Italy and beyond started to depict migrants escaping across the Mediterranean Sea as slaves and those (supposedly) organising such crossings as slave traders. EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, for instance, argued in 2015 that ‘traffickers’ would turn migrants into slaves by exploiting their hopes (European Union External Action Service, 2015). The same year, Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi noted in a New York Times op-ed, entitled ‘Helping the migrants is everyone’s duty’ that trafficking networks were ‘the slave traders of the 21st century’ (Renzi, 2015). In 2018, Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini characterised people crossing the sea as a ‘valuable cargo of humans – of human flesh’ and those civil organisations engaged in sea rescue as profiteers of trading such cargo (Aljazeera, 2018).

As in your case, where supposed vulnerability legitimises continuous colonial exploitations and subjugations, we see how the figure of the modern slave – or what I have referred to as the migrant slave (Stierl, 2020) – is being mobilised for particular political purposes. Namely, the deterrence and containment of people on the move as well as the criminalisation of those aiding their mobility or survival. At first glance, the figure of the migrant slave appears paradoxical, given that migration is commonly understood as intentional movement (across borders) and slavery as a coerced condition of confinement and unfreedom. Yet, in what Chu (2016: 408) has called an ‘anti-trafficking crusade’, the production of this figure allows to produce migrants as both victims and threats at one and the same time – thus as subjects at risk as well as risky subjects, as Aradau (2003) has famously argued. The figure thus legitimises measures to deter by supposedly saving lives. In order to protect Europe from an invasion from the South as well as prevent the enslavement and drowning of those on the move, migrants need to be contained ‘elsewhere’.

Racialised imaginaries of invasion underwrite and connect both our cases. If the ‘Global North’ fails to act, be it in terms of the climate or other conditions that ‘drive’ people towards the shores of Europe, then millions of Black and Brown people from the ‘Global South’ will breach EU borders and threaten the European ‘way of life’. This racialisation is connected to naturalising imaginaries of masses of ‘others’, often construed as waves, floods, even human tsunamis. This naturalisation and dehumanisation thus produce migrants as a sort of ‘invasive species’, a term that commonly refers to ‘[a]n invasive organism [that] has come into an environment from somewhere else and has a harmful effect on animals, plants, etc. already living in that environment’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2024). Given that these racial imaginaries map onto specific populations, commonly in the ‘Global South’, they are at one and the same time also spatial imaginaries. Litfin (1999: 363) has pointed to the ‘chaos-in-the-periphery bias’ in debates on climate change, which persists today, especially when connected with the issue of migration as migrants are produced as the embodiment and harbinger of chaos. Could you unpack that further with regards to your research focus?

Nandita Dutta: To do so, let me return to the notion of vulnerability. Rendered legible and quantifiable through indices, vulnerability is said to create both climate migrants and modern slaves. To begin with, vulnerability was an improvement on essentialist ideas about geographies and populations: it was meant to show that it is not exposure to risks but people’s (social, economic, political) capacity to deal with those risks that determines their impact. However, its reductive and ahistorical usage has ended up further marginalising already marginalised places and people, perpetuating epistemic and material violence (Marino and Faas, 2020).

In climate science, vulnerability indices locate vulnerability not only in certain geographies but also in people: women, children, Indigenous people, disabled people, elderly people and socio-economically marginalised people, leaving little to the imagination about which kind of body is marked as ‘non-vulnerable’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023). Similarly, with the aim to provide ‘evidence’ on modern slavery for state and non-state actors to act upon, the Global Slavery Index ‘measures’ and maps vulnerability (Larsen and Durgana, 2017). Producing vulnerability as a scientific/statistical fact is used to support the claim that ‘hotspots’ of climate change are also where risks of modern slavery are the most severe (Bales and Sovacool, 2021). Thus, imaginaries of figures and spaces are brought together, locating the ‘threat’ of climate migration and modern slavery – separate but also conjoint – in people and places in the ‘Global South’.

That maps of climate change and modern slavery coincide, which is to say that their spatial imaginaries coincide, is not a coincidence. From natural disasters and under-development, to modern slavery and climate-induced migration: concepts change, but the same, old, colonial imaginaries proliferate through a western gaze. The epistemological and ontological underpinnings of this gaze mean that the rest of the world is always found lacking, in the throes of danger, vulnerable, unable to help itself, in need of saving. The cure for the world’s problems must be found in western aid and assistance or science and policies, creating new forms of path-dependencies and sustaining old ones (de Wit, 2021). This completely omits attending to vulnerability to both climate change and modern slavery that is produced through colonial, racist and capitalist institutions and practices. In turn, these racialised imaginaries not only create a sense of invincibility and invulnerability in the ‘Global North’ but also posit it as the space of science, policy and governance. Imaginaries of whiteness seamlessly merge with imaginaries of expertise. The ‘knowledge–power nexus’ based in the ‘Global North’ continues to thrive by reproducing the same racist and essentialist tropes about the ‘Global South’ (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2010: 208).

What gives me hope, however, are possibilities of contestation. At the last climate mobilities conference I attended, this time in an African city, local knowledge producers urged academics from the ‘Global North’ to use concepts such as ‘vulnerability’ more carefully. Their research participants in Africa – pastoral communities suffering droughts and floods – had rejected the term, stressing that although they lived in conditions of vulnerability, they did not see themselves as vulnerable because this implied that they needed saving. Contestation can also manifest in the form of nuanced scholarship: academic researchers, regardless of their location, must stop using concepts such as modern slavery and climate-induced migration as bogeymen that invoke either fear or moral superiority. When links are drawn between migration, climate change and modern slavery, it must not be with the sole purpose of advancing academic careers by building on fashionable and fundable concepts, but to point to the root cause of racial capitalism and forge solidarities.

Maurice Stierl: To me, it seems like the figure of the modern or migrant slave is unlikely to go away anytime soon. It does ‘political work’ (Mountz, 2020: xix) by producing and reproducing vulnerable and threatening others as well as the western self as both protector and defender, constantly recreating the elsewhere as chaotic and the here as a place of safety and order. As plainly and infamously put by EU High Representative Josep Borrell: ‘Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. . . . Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden’ (European Union External Action Service, 2022).

During a time when migration has become so pivotal in authoritarian projects that are currently sweeping through EUrope, the USA and beyond, contesting the dehumanisation of people on the move as invasive species is a tall order. We see how the racist idea of ‘remigration’ is considered as a viable response to supposed ‘migrant invasions’, often connected to ‘great replacement’ fantasies.

Still, what gives me hope is the unruliness of migration itself. While anti-trafficking crusaders will continue to mobilise racial imaginaries of migrant slaves to justify deterrence efforts, they regularly fail to succeed. The decades-long history of unauthorised Mediterranean migration is one of spatial disobedience in the face of increasingly militarised borders. In a politics of escape, and often organised in ‘unusual collective formations’ (Tazzioli, 2020: 2), people on the move evade spatial traps and establish an incorrigible presence in EUrope. What shatters the figure of the migrant slave, denuded of political agency, then, is precisely this refusal to be contained and the stubborn desire to move on, despite exposure to harrowing forms of border violence.