This journalistic essay examines contemporary slavery as a structural regime of the current global order rather than as a residual anomaly, a marginal criminal deviation, or an isolated humanitarian problem. Drawing on a critical review of the literature in political science, political economy, and decolonial approaches, it argues that modern slavery is actively produced by political decisions, economic logics, and global hierarchies that generate populations that are systematically vulnerable, exploitable, and disposable. The analysis is organized around three central axes: the political production of vulnerability, the political economy of extreme exploitation, and the differential management of life and death. The essay combines bibliographic review and critical interpretation with a narrative counterpoint that situates the phenomenon in its concrete materiality, proposing an integral reading that allows contemporary slavery to be understood across its full pragmatic, ethical, and political arc.

Naming what the system needs to conceal

Slavery did not end. What ended was its name. In the contemporary world, the word “slavery” is uncomfortable because it destabilizes the foundational narrative of the liberal order: that of a system based on freedom, contract, and human dignity. For this reason, when it does appear, it is usually reduced to illegal trafficking, organized crime, or an alien barbarism, always located far from the economic and political center of the world.

Millions of people today work under conditions that meet all the material criteria of slavery: coercion, absolute dependence, impossibility of exit, direct or structural violence, and systematic dispossession of rights. This is not a failure of the global system, but one of its conditions of possibility. Contemporary slavery is neither a residue of the past nor an excess that could be corrected with better laws; it is a form of organization of the world that cuts across economies, borders, states, and value chains, enabling levels of consumption, competitiveness, and accumulation that are incompatible with universal respect for human rights.

Understanding this phenomenon requires an analytical shift. It is not enough to describe extreme cases or to denounce isolated abuses. It is necessary to interrogate the political, economic, and symbolic conditions that make it possible for millions of lives to be exploited without scandal, without mourning, and without effective responsibility. This is the central objective of this work.

Contemporary slavery in current critical literature

The study of contemporary slavery has ceased to be a marginal subfield and has become a central axis of reflection in political science, critical political economy, and global power studies. This shift responds to a qualitative change in approaches: slavery has begun to be analyzed as a structural expression of the contemporary global system.

The work of Kevin Bales represents a turning point by redefining modern slavery beyond legal ownership. For Bales, contemporary slavery is characterized by total control over a person through coercion, violence, and dehumanization, even in the absence of legal recognition. This conceptual shift makes it possible to identify as slavery practices that positive law often classifies as informality or abuse, expanding the field of political analysis.

However, the initial emphasis on illegality and institutional weakness has been complemented by approaches that underscore the selective presence of the state. Stanley Cohen provides a decisive key here with his concept of “states of denial,” which explains how liberal democracies can be aware of the existence of practices of slavery and still manage them politically without assuming responsibility. Slavery does not persist through ignorance, but through structural tolerance.

The shift toward a political economy of slavery is further deepened by the work of Siddharth Kara, who demonstrates that modern slavery constitutes a highly profitable transnational industry. His contribution connects extreme exploitation to global value chains, showing that demand, competitiveness, and cost reduction are central drivers of the phenomenon.

Moisés Naím, for his part, allows us to understand the convergence between illegal markets, corruption, and formal state structures. His analysis reveals that slavery does not operate in an isolated underworld, but in gray zones where legality and illegality coexist functionally.

Saskia Sassen introduces an additional structural key by conceptualizing expulsion as a central process of contemporary capitalism. Before being exploited, populations are expelled from formal systems of protection, becoming available for extreme forms of exploitation. In this framework, slavery appears as the structural destination of prior processes of dispossession.

Decolonial approaches deepen this reading by situating contemporary slavery within a historical continuity of racialization of labor. Aníbal Quijano shows how the coloniality of power assigns differential value to lives according to origin and territory, while Achille Mbembe introduces the notion of necropolitics to think of slavery as a form of governance that administers who can be exploited to exhaustion and who can die without mourning.

Finally, the historical contribution of Eric Williams prevents any accidentalist reading: modern capitalism was founded on slavery, and its contemporary mutation does not break with that logic, but rather updates it.

This theoretical framework converges on a shared thesis: contemporary slavery is a central technology of organization in the globalized world.

It is not a residue

Contemporary slavery constitutes a structural regime of the current economic and political order. It is not limited to human trafficking or forced labor in its classical form, but manifests as an assemblage of practices, policies, and omissions that systematically produce exploitable, disposable, and silent populations. Understanding it requires abandoning the logic of episodic scandal and assuming a long-term perspective capable of articulating history, state, market, and power.

First axis: the political production of vulnerability

The starting point of modern slavery is not physical chaining, but the deliberate production of vulnerability. The most robust literature in political science agrees that no human being is born enslaved: one becomes enslaveable when deprived of legal protection, effective rights, and real alternatives for survival.

Contemporary migration policies constitute one of the main devices of this production of vulnerability. The criminalization of irregular migration, border closures, the externalization of controls, and the precarization of legal status generate populations trapped in a legal limbo. In that space, exploitation ceases to be an exception and becomes the norm. From this perspective, slavery does not arise from the absence of the state, but from its selective presence: the state acts forcefully to control, monitor, and expel, but withdraws when it comes to protection. Illegality is not an accident, but a functional condition that transforms the undocumented person, without contract or support network, into an absolutely dependent labor force.

Critical bibliography insists that this vulnerability is not only individual, but structural. Entire communities are expelled from formal economies through processes of dispossession, wars, climate crises, or productive collapse. Once expelled, they become available to circuits of exploitation presented as the only possible exit. Modern slavery begins long before the act of direct exploitation: it begins with expulsion.

Second axis: the political economy of extreme exploitation

The second axis dismantles the myth that slavery is economically marginal. Contemporary slavery is profitable and deeply integrated into global value chains. Entire sectors of the economy depend on forced or quasi-forced labor: intensive agriculture, construction, mining, the textile industry, fishing, domestic work, and forced prostitution. In all these sectors the same pattern is repeated: maximum reduction of labor costs through total control over the exploited person.

The difference from historical slavery is not moral, but logistical. The modern slave is not bought; they are rented, replaced, and abandoned. Human life becomes cheap because it is abundant, and it is abundant because the system continuously produces vulnerable people. This logic turns slavery into an extreme form of precarization, compatible with the neoliberal discourse of flexibility and efficiency.

From a critical political economy perspective, this phenomenon cannot be explained without attending to corporate and state complicity. Opaque supply chains, cascading subcontracting, and the externalization of responsibilities allow large corporations to benefit indirectly from exploitation without assuming legal or reputational consequences. Slavery hides at the last link, but value rises intact.

While profits concentrate, human costs disperse and are rendered invisible.

Third axis: the differential management of life and death

The third axis introduces a deeper dimension: contemporary slavery as a form of governance over life and death. Not all lives have the same political value. Some are protected, others exploited, others directly disposable.

From critical and decolonial approaches, modern slavery appears as part of a necropolitical logic: power decides who deserves to live with rights and who can be consumed to exhaustion. The enslaved worker is not only exploited; they are placed outside the horizon of mourning, outside the moral community.

This differential management is expressed in the normalization of suffering. Deaths from exhaustion, workplace accidents, untreated diseases, or direct violence are assumed as inevitable collateral damage. The disappearance of exploited people rarely generates public alarm. Their bodies, when they appear, do not interrupt the functioning of the system.

Here slavery connects with other contemporary forms of structural violence: permanent refugee camps, environmental sacrifice zones, occupied territories, and criminalized informal economies. In all cases, the pattern is similar: entire populations reduced to an administered existence, without future, without protection, without voice.

This axis allows us to understand why contemporary slavery persists even in contexts that define themselves as democratic and defenders of human rights. It is not a matter of incoherence, but of hierarchy. Rights exist, but not for everyone.

Conclusion: roads of light to face the truth

Dawn breaks before the sun appears. The child gets up while the sky is still gray, not because someone wakes him, but because the body has already learned the hour of fear. He is between ten and twelve years old; no one knows for sure. His bare feet step on the damp earth as he walks toward the mine. There is no breakfast. Sometimes a handful of cassava from the day before, sometimes nothing. Hunger is not an emergency: it is a permanent state.

The entrance to the mine does not look like a mine. It is an irregular hole in the ground, held up by fragile sticks and promises no one keeps. The child goes in with other small bodies. There are no helmets, no artificial light. Only hands, nails, and stones. They dig for hours in narrow tunnels where the air grows thick and silence weighs more than the rock. Each dark fragment they find may contain coltan. Each useless fragment is lost time.

Dust clings to skin, lungs, and eyes. The child coughs, but does not stop. He knows stopping is dangerous. Not because of collapse, but because of punishment. Sometimes someone does not come back out. No one asks. No one records a name. The day continues as if that body had never been there.

At midday, if luck holds, someone hands out a little cloudy water. There is no shade. The sun falls vertically on a devastated landscape. The child does not know what coltan is for. He does not know it will travel thousands of kilometers, that it will be refined, mixed, and integrated into shiny devices. He does not know his hands hold the mineral heart of smartphones, computers, electric cars, and precision weapons. No one has told him. And even if they did, nothing would change.

For buyers of coltan, the child does not exist. He has no face, no age, no history. He is an invisible cost in an opaque supply chain. In contracts, in bags of minerals, and in financial statements, his name does not appear. The material appears. The price appears. Efficiency appears.

At nightfall, the child walks back. The body aches, but exhaustion does not grant immediate rest. Sometimes there is some food. Sometimes not. He lies down on the ground, without electricity and without inner silence. Tomorrow will be the same. If he lives.

This is not an exceptional story. It is the daily routine of thousands of children in the coltan mines of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is the material starting point of a system that presents itself as modern, clean, and technological.

The story of the child in the mine is not a literary device. It is the material synthesis of the three axes analyzed. His vulnerability was produced. His exploitation is profitable. His life is managed as disposable.

The bibliographic review converges on an unequivocal conclusion: contemporary slavery cannot be eradicated without transforming the structures that generate it. Laws, ethical certifications, and responsible consumption campaigns are not enough. As long as the global economic model requires disposable bodies to sustain its efficiency, slavery will persist under new forms.

Understanding contemporary slavery across its full pragmatic arc means accepting that it does not occur far away, on the margins, or by accident. It occurs at the very heart of the world we inhabit.

The bibliographic and conceptual review presented here leads to an uncomfortable but necessary conclusion: eradicating contemporary slavery is not a technical or humanitarian problem, but a political one. It would require transforming the conditions that make it possible: exclusionary migration regimes, economies based on extreme precarization, and states that protect capital and abandon people.

Modern slavery is not fought only with laws, awareness campaigns, or symbolic gestures. It is fought by questioning the model that needs it. That is why it persists. That is why it recycles itself. That is why it adopts new forms.

This essay does not seek to close the debate, but to open it with clarity. The literature reviewed offers no consolation, but it does offer tools. Roads of light to understand the phenomenon without euphemisms or moral shortcuts. Understanding is the first act of responsibility. The second, inevitably, is deciding which side of this global structure one chooses to stand on.

Bibliography

  • Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. University of California Press, 1999.
  • Bales, Kevin. The New Slavery: Contemporary Slavery and the Fight for Human Freedom. University of California Press, 2004.
  • Bales, Kevin. Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective. University of California Press, 2012.
  • Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Polity Press, 2001.
  • Kara, Siddharth. Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Columbia University Press, 2009.
  • Kara, Siddharth. The Business of Trafficking: Inside the Secret World of Modern Slavery. Columbia University Press, 2017.
  • Naím, Moisés. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy. Anchor Books, 2005.
  • Naím, Moisés. The Globalization of Crime. Princeton University Press, 2016.
  • Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014.
  • Quijano, Aníbal. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla, 2000.
  • Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 1944.