// Panel 2B //
Contemporary Policies and Their Imperial Origins

Discussant: Dr Maeve Ryan // King's College London // History and Grand Strategy

Abstracts

Anna Forringer-Beal // University of Cambridge // Gender Studies

Finding White Slaves: The lost historical context of modern anti-trafficking policy in Britain

Using a feminist genealogical approach to studying the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, this research argues that contemporary anti-trafficking law is conceptualized through white slavery narratives, which spread across Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Born out of concern over women’s employment and increased immigration threatening white identity, white slavery campaigns focused imperial anxieties on protecting the ‘white slave’, who was often represented as a young woman forced into sexual exploitation by a foreign or racially othered perpetrator. By conducting a genealogical tracing of the white slave figure, this paper reveals how the construct of trafficking as a crime was used to enforce imperial borders while ostensibly helping survivors of violence. It is essential for modern day anti-trafficking researchers and practitioners to understand this history because white slavery discourse continues to shape contemporary policy in three ways. First, the persistent image of the ideal victim stems from racialized fears coalesced into the white slave. Second, white slavery was used to enhance border regulation through the criminalization of foreign perpetrators. Third, white slavery provided a compassionate cover for immigration control as the British empire expanded. Understanding these femonationalist arguments helps to counter such rhetoric and move towards better solutions.

Biography

Anna Forringer-Beal is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Multidisciplinary Gender Studies. Her work focuses on how Britain conceptualizes anti-trafficking policy. This project takes her back to the white slavery campaigns of late nineteenth century and through to the creation of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Her research interests include queer methodologies, decoloniality, genealogy, migration studies, and public policy. This work has been graciously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates-Cambridge Trust.

Sonia Qadir // University of New South Wales // Law

Colonial Criminal Law and Racialized Policing in Contemporary Pakistan*

In the backdrop of the War on Terror, the postcolonial State in Pakistan has made frequent use of special legislation like Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 and various emergency powers to curb dissident political forces and social movements, as well as manage populations on the margins of the nation-state. To this end, it has also regularly engaged in enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings. South Asian legal history scholarship has done critical work in tracing the narratives of terrorism and the use of emergency powers and extrajudicial measures to legal provisions and concepts developed under colonial rule in India. Yet a deeper look at the criminalization of Pashtun identity and politics in contemporary Pakistan -a crucial vector in the War on Terror - shows that in addition to the use of these “exceptional” measures, the State also heavily relies on ordinary criminal law provisions, which also date back to the colonial period. This paper explores a few such provisions from Pakistan Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure 1898, traces their historical lineages and argues that the racialized policing of Pashtuns in Pakistan under the War on Terror needs to be understood not just with respect to terrorism and emergency provisions, but also the more mundane legal provisions of criminal law, originally developed as important tools of colonial policing.

Biography

Sonia Qadir hails from Lahore, Pakistan and is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law and Justice (Sydney). Her PhD research provides a grounded study of Pakistan’s legal security regime in the context and aftermath of the War on Terror.

*Note that Sonia’s presentation has not been recorded.

Angela Smith // University of New South Wales // Law

Aviation Security: flying, friendship and enmity at the end of Empire**

In the two decades’ long War on Terror, the notion of a racialised “security threat” has been promulgated. One site of intensification of risk management has been the airport, with a heightened sense of risk in relation to airport security, increased regulation and surveillance of air travel, and practices like the US “Muslim ban”. While a body of important literature has analysed the proliferation of these security discourses and technologies post 9/11, the securitisation and criminalisation of racial categories in relation to air travel has a much longer history that has been eclipsed by 9/11.

The first international steps towards securitising global aviation were taken in response to a spate of political plane hijackings in the 1950s-60s. The decades prior had been filled with optimism towards global aviation, as 52 states signed the 1944 Chicago Convention, and newly independent states developed fledgling national carriers. Attempts to securitise plane travel and criminalise hijackers were met with division, with many postcolonial states supporting the political protest of hijacking in support of the liberation of Palestine. By drawing on the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) meeting archives, this paper looks at the legal history of international efforts to secure civil aviation in a spirit of post-war globalism belied by ongoing allegiances to empire and imperial power structures. While global air travel was infused with hope in the Chicago Convention, political movements - or an excess of anti-colonial movement - needed to be heavily regulated by law. Early plane hijackings thus form part of the genealogy of securitised aerial power that has not been sufficiently factored into debates about security, mobility, race and migration.

Biography

Angela is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where her doctoral research takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of aviation and air power in deportation and border policing practices across the Mediterranean. She is interested in political geography, migration, imperial histories and presents, and security practices in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa region. She holds a Masters in Migration and Refugee Studies from the American University in Cairo.

**Note that Angela’s presentation has not been recorded.