Efforts to combat human trafficking have grown in the last few decades, with states, international governmental organizations (IGOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working around the world to address the trade of people under conditions of force, fraud or deception for the purpose of exploitation. How has contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy developed globally and why? Competing approaches in global and transnational sociology – world polity and ‘coercion’ perspectives – offer different explanations, with the first focusing on culture and the second focusing on political and economic power. Using data on 1861 anti-trafficking NGOs worldwide as well as secondary sources to qualitatively analyze the historical development of contemporary anti-trafficking advocacy as a case study, this article demonstrates a more complicated process than either perspective predicts. What is needed is an approach that considers political, economic, and cultural forces involved in globalizing movements and that avoids a priori assumptions about the operations of power and the relations of the organizational actors. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Human trafficking Sociological theory transnational advocacy Nongovernmental organizations

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