Critical Allies He adds that enslavement can refer to a relationship between two or more people, or to a social system. 6 Many activities, including enslavement, continue despite their illegality. Slavery’s illicit nature therefore describes the political situation of the contemporary slave. While ownership is openly asserted only rarely, the letter of the law proves an inconstant and elusive source of clarity. International conventions with broad support often produce such consensus by leaving sufficient ambiguity for each signatory to do their own interpretive work. In addition, labour and migration law frequently set the contours of what must be successfully circumvented, with penalties for failure included in the calculation. An example is the easy masking of literal enslavement in perfunctory compliance with contractual labour language. There are crucial differences between enslavement and other fundamentally exploitative labour regimes (I am thinking foremost of guestworker programs, which were popularly seen at the turn of the twentieth century as ‘slavery, poorly disguised’, 7 but also of varieties of systems of indenture); however, the substantive differences rely on institutions, regulations and norms — that, for instance, make a pledge against a debt payable and therefore temporary — that have increasingly eroded. 8 There is no question that there are difficulties and debates over precise counting and the generation of defensible numbers; 9 however, the aim of defining and elaborating contemporary enslavement is to develop more and better-informed guesses about who will be at risk and what constitutes meaningful relief. Those most implicated should be at the centre of interpreting the term’s applicability to them. Many quickly recognise their condition as one that moves beyond forced labour to literal enslavement. In so doing, some are fully aware of the larger legal and rights terrain they are navigating. For many who do regard themselves as slaves, this condition, as with debtbound children in India, begins with immobility. 10 For others, it is often their limited capacity to migrate that makes the movement they will choose illegal. This illegality proves lucrative for some. For the migrants themselves, if, on arrival, 6 7 8 9 10 ibid. Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press 2011) 13. On guestworkers, see ibid; Immanuel Ness, Guestworkers and Resistance to US Corporate Despotism (University of Illinois Press 2011). For an example of debating numbers of the enslaved, see Kevin Bales, ‘Slavery in its Contemporary Manifestations’ in Jean Allain (ed), The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford University Press 2012) 229; Orlando Patterson, ‘Trafficking, Gender and Slavery: Past and Present’ in Jean Allain (ed), The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford University Press 2012) 262. For a wider contextualisation of the challenges of rigorous counting, see Joel Quirk, Unfinished Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery (UNESCO Publishing 2009); Bales, Understanding Global Slavery (n 2). On the problems of accurately counting trafficked people and trafficked sex workers, see John Salt and Jennifer Hogarth, ‘Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe: A Review of the Evidence’ in Frank Laczko and David M Thompson, Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe: A Review of the Evidence with Case Studies from Hungary, Poland and Ukraine (International Organization for Migration 2000) 11; Ronald Weitzer, ‘The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade’ (2007) 35(3) Politics and Society 447; Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007); Kamala Kempadoo (ed), Trafficking and Prostitute Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Paradigm 2005). Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Anchor Books 1999) 113–15. 155