Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2021 3(2) produce vulnerability or encourage forced labor, in fact, through their laws and policies do precisely that? 11 Gordon finds that enslavement, like statelessness, is not a radical exception both historically and in the present. She notes that its absence would be more of a radical change rather than its existence. By extending back to Homeric Greece, pre-imperial Rome, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, imperial Islam and other contexts, Gordon highlights the continuity of slavery practices. She documents how the concept of slavery was long accepted, and that in the past, slaves were distinguished by their foreignness. 12 What is different about enslavement today? In the contemporary enslavement model, profitability is higher, and the relationships are not as long-lived; labour is casual, and people are treated as dispensable and disposable. Legal ownership is avoided. Due to these characteristics, Gordon argues that it ‘bears a greater resemblance to preEuromodern colonial slave trading’ rather than the transatlantic slave trade because people are trafficked and enslaved within their place of origin, by people of the same ethnic, religious backgrounds and/or by the same gender. 13 She notes, ‘the multinational, multicultural, and multiracial nature of contemporary slave trading, if anything, more closely resembles pre-transatlantic versions, particularly those of the Roman and varied Islamic empires’. 14 To her, ‘vulnerability [today] … reflects a more complex and idiosyncratic combination of multiple factors, including but not limited to poverty, race, ethnicity, sex, immigration status, class, caste, and age’. 15 Gordon acknowledges, however, that vulnerability to enslavement is still largely racialised. In an attempt to define slavery as distinct ‘from other forms of domination and conditions of unfreedom’, Gordon goes on to describe the different definitions of slavery that scholars have developed. 16 Some scholars take up a definition of slavery that focuses on it as a state of being in which an individual gets entrapped, while others see it more as a social system. She notes that the International Labour Organization uses ‘forced labour’ as an umbrella term equivalent to ‘contemporary slavery’, defining it as labour provided under threat. She further distinguishes slaves from wage slaves. In contrast to waged labour, slaves are misled and have no choice to leave. Gordon also differentiates between trafficking and slavery when she points out that trafficking is not an individual aberration, an act committed by an individual sadist. 17 Thinking about it as a consequence of economic imperatives, she largely perceives trafficking and enslavement as outcomes of the economic and political systems of governance in which we find ourselves. These different definitions help to estimate the number of people who are enslaved today. Beyond quantifying enslavement, Gordon finds that enslavement is likewise revealing of today’s neoliberal, geopolitical economic circumstances. Contemporary enslavement is reflective of the ‘simultaneous and interrelated underdeveloping and overaccumulating in an already highly unequal global 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 ibid 42. ibid 65. ibid 46. ibid 61. ibid. ibid 49. ibid 124. 356