Invited comment [to: Sedentary Optics : static anti-trafficking and mobile Victims by Sverre Molland]

That the problem of human trafficking requires urgent attention is beyond doubt. Indeed, numerous individuals, (international) organizations, governments, and funding bodies are active in the field of anti-trafficking. Together this has produced a plethora of interventions, making it tempting to ask, What works, what does not, and why? Such concerns drive a good share of the knowledge production about (anti-)trafficking.
Yet Dr. Sverre Molland’s work shows that, by asking whether counter-trafficking policies and practices “work,” we lose sight of the theoretically more compelling questions of how they work and why they work the way they do. This relates Molland’s work to larger questions in the ethnography of development, shedding particular light on its spatial dynamics. [...]