CRITICAL ALLIES: ON CONTEMPORARY ENSLAVEMENT AND STATELESSNESS JANE ANNA GORDON * When I began reading about and researching contemporary enslavement some twenty years ago, I did so primarily as a political theorist rooted in Africana Studies, a field animated, among other core problems, by grappling with how the African diaspora has resisted institutions of racialised slavery and colonisation. I had always gravitated toward the Marxist camps of Black Studies, which rooted analyses of colonialism in those of racial capitalism, and to those that coalesced around the framework of Global Southern feminisms, which insisted that one could not understand race and class separately from gender. I was therefore very surprised to learn that many of my most valued colleagues were profoundly sceptical of — if they did not outright reject — work on contemporary enslavement or ‘modern slavery’. 1 Similarly, while none of my colleagues whose work is rooted in Indigenous thought and politics would diminish the significance of what is at stake in documented instances of statelessness, nor the value of the complex and difficult labour of counteracting it, few saw such efforts as immediately relevant to the political issues that they prioritise. If we step back to consider both contemporary enslavement and statelessness through a more capacious lens, we can see why neither should be understood as the siloed purview of human rights or international law — why they are instead directly pertinent to scholars motivated by the many legacies and continued challenges of racialised enslavement and settler colonialism. What first drew me to the writings of scholars like Kevin Bales and Moisés Naím was how convincingly they demonstrated that to be contemporary, enslavement today mirrors the political economic conditions and norms in which it thrives. For example, while there is enslaved labour involved in the mass production of agricultural goods, contemporary enslavement writ large is not concentrated in one sector of the economy but involved with multiple interacting * 1 Jane Anna Gordon teaches Political Science at the University of Connecticut in the United States. She is author, most recently, of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge 2020) and co-editor of The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance (University Press of Kentucky 2019) and of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg (Rowman and Littlefield) (forthcoming). I avoid calling contemporary enslavement modern slavery for two primary reasons. First, while scholars rooted in different disciplines debate when Euromodernity begins, none would question that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was quintessentially modern, propelling the development of global capitalism. Second, slavery refers to what people engaged in slave trading hope to achieve with those they ensnare. Despite conditions of enslavement that make it near impossible, enslaved people resist becoming or remaining slaves.