Legal Institutions, Climate Change, and Human Trafficking

• In Event: International Political Networks: Elites, Institutions, Diplomacy, & Crises

Abstract

In recent years, legal institutions in many countries have evolved to combat the risk of human trafficking. One key concern cited by both researchers and policymakers is that by impacting economic development and harming the livelihoods of households in susceptible sender countries, climate change will increase the number of trafficked individuals over the coming decades. Interestingly, while both international law and climate change researchers often focus on the legal institutions and climate change impacts in sending and target countries, little attention is given to the “middleman” countries through which individuals are trafficked between the sender and target states. Focusing on the key importance of these “middleman” countries in facilitating trafficking, accounting for contiguity, distance, and network positions, we argue that, from an international legal perspective, lax laws in these countries will make them equally hospitable for allowing trafficking through their borders. We additionally argue that environmental stressors can intensify pressures on traffickers in more susceptible “middleman” states, pushing trafficking into countries where both laws are lax and environmental shocks are relatively less frequent. We then rely on machine learning techniques to generate a new comprehensive network of human trafficking using qualitative human trafficking reports. Using statistical network analysis, we identify the most influential “middleman” countries in the network and analyze how climate shocks impact the importance of different states as preferred trafficking routes. We show the countries in greatest risk for climate-induced trafficking are (a) “middleman” countries with (b) lax laws and (c) relatively greater environmental resilience. We use our findings to map the most important “middleman” countries according to predicted trafficking risk.

Authors

• Jeffery Shih-Chieh Wang, Indiana University Bloomington

• Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, George Mason University

• Ore Koren, Indiana University Bloomington