The introduction explains the setting of the ethnography at the intersections of law, NGOs, the Indian state, and the global anti-trafficking regime. It explains the sequence of interventions the book will follow, from rescues to courts to shelters, prescribed by Indian law and implemented by legal actors and NGOs. It lays out the sites and processes the book will explore through encounters between those implementing these interventions, and those experiencing them. It outlines the book’s central aims: how it uses the intersections of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution interventions as points of entry to foreground how sex workers navigate them, critique the prevalent assumptions and preferred solutions of the global anti-trafficking regime, and explore the complex relationship between law and NGOs in India. It discusses the broader concerns and approaches these interventions bring to the governance of prostitution – global humanitarianism, policing and criminal justice, the paternalism of the Indian state and NGOs, neoliberal women’s empowerment programs, and an anti-immigrant sociopolitical climate. The introduction also explains the author’s methods, research design, and positionality, and the organization of the book.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual and conceptual frameworks shaping the book. It explains the sociolegal context in which the book is situated – in particular, India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) of 1956, the US-led anti-trafficking regime, and the role of anti-trafficking NGOs. Conceptually, Chapter 1 lays out how the book places postcolonial law in a broader field of neoliberal government including state agencies and foreign-funded NGOs acting upon prostitution. It explains how the book pursues new directions in legal anthropology with an attentiveness to multiple scales of governance and law’s implementation by state and nonstate actors, while remaining deeply rooted in the minutiae of legal practices and spaces. Finally, Chapter 1 shows how the book is in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have critiqued anti-trafficking campaigns and provided nuanced ethnographic insights on the complexities of sex workers’ lives. It explains how, unlike these studies, this book is not an ethnography of sex work, sex trafficking, or even of anti-trafficking interventions alone. Instead, it explores how India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge and act upon sex workers, and how sex workers navigate and resist them.

This multisited ethnography is not about sex work or sex trafficking, or even about anti-trafficking campaigns alone. Instead, as an anthropologist of law, NGOs, and the Indian state, the author situates the governance of prostitution in the broader Indian sociolegal and global humanitarian contexts. The book illuminates how Indian law and global anti-trafficking campaigns come together to govern prostitution, combining humanitarianism, paternalism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality. It explores the consequences of US-funded anti-trafficking campaigns operating alongside India’s existing legal framework against prostitution, and highlights the significant role NGOs play in suturing and implementing both kinds of interventions. At the same time, the book tracks how women removed from the sex trade – some of whom were trafficked and others voluntary sex workers – navigate these overlapping interventions. The title Immoral Traffic comes from India’s anti-prostitution law, which donor-driven NGOs draw upon to implement their anti-trafficking agenda. This law’s provisions and procedures to “manage” prostitution, and NGOs’ efforts to deploy and extend them, feature centrally throughout the book. Immoral Traffic takes the reader along the sequence of interventions this law prescribes and sex workers experience, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters.

This chapter examines the foundations and evolution of papal legation in the Middle Ages. It frames the development of this ecclesiastical office in the context of burgeoning papal authority and its reception in Christian lands. And it posits the growth of legation as a natural and effective response to the Roman Curia’s administrative, bureaucratic, and legal needs.

The Introduction lays out connections between Parables unique to Luke and stories about Israel’s founding families. Like Jesus who looked to stories of Israel’s origins when explaining matters relating to himself, Luke reworked well-known Genesis texts to convey ideas.

The Healing on the Sabbath parable’s focus on higher and lower standing at a feast affirms humility over ostentation. Evoked is the grand meal given by Joseph in honor of his brothers who, on account of his high and their low standing, could not sit with him at his table.

This chapter examines the international legal framework on biodiversity, reflects on the scope of its implementation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and highlights the way forward for enhancing coherent, holistic, and integrated implementation of biodiversity treaties in the region. It provides an overview of the status of implementation, primarily through an assessment of the progress of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity including the Aichi targets (2011–2020), under the Convention of Biological Diversity, and assesses the challenges and opportunities of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. In addition to a literature review, the chapter analyses information from national reports by parties submitted to secretariats to the CBD and on informational platforms such as UNEP’s InforMEA and Law and Environment Assistance Platform.

This chapter provides a conceptual overview of the nature and scope of biodiversity and nature conservation law and policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It explores the different sources of law that underpin biodiversity management in the region. It then discusses the character, status, and force of the different sources, including the interrelationships between them.

The second book of the Bible, Exodus, is the subject of this essay, covering the growth and enslavement of the Israelite nation, early career of Moses, rescue from Egypt, and covenant on Sinai.

Chapter 1 focuses on the revolution of 1688 in Britian, in which the ideal of liberty as independence was promised to the people as the cornerstone of a new constitution to replace James II’s allegedly despotic use of arbitrary power. After examining the Bill of Rights, in which the fundamental rights of the people are laid out, the chapter turns to consider the provenance of the underlying ideal of liberty as independence and its contrast with arbitrary power. One major source is shown to have been the discussion of civil liberty by the historians and moralists of ancient Rome, especially Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. The influence of these sources on the development of early modern republicanism in England is traced, especially in the works of Milton and Harrington. The other major source was the discussion of the law of persons in the Digest of Roman law, in which a fundamental distinction was drawn between free persons and dependants, including slaves. The influence of this legal tradition, especially as filtered by Bracton into English common law, is traced in the strand of constitutional thinking that runs from Fortescue and Thomas Smith to Coke, Selden and their followers.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

In June 2020, the largest democracy movement in a generation emerged in Thailand. The movement began with three demands: the current PM must resign, a new constitution must be drafted, and the state must stop threatening dissidents. In August 2020, a fourth demand was added: the monarchy must be reformed. This demand is where the transformative power of the movement came from, but also led to a swift crackdown in the form of police violence and prosecutions. This may appear to be a particularly egregious illustration of the rule-by-law regimes favored by autocrats, but close examination indicates that the law is being used to criminalize peaceful dissent and the mere questioning of how power is exercised. By examining several key cases, this chapter shows how the Thai regime aims to reshape both the rule of law and the polity through the arbitrary exercise of repressive power.

The chapter explores how the legal system, akin to science and economics, serves as a tool for depoliticizing human decisions. It argues that the transformation of political processes into seemingly apolitical directives is a strategic move to prevent the illegitimate use of power and violence. The status of law as autonomous and above politics is examined, tracing its historical roots to the naturalization of law and forming the basis for legitimate legal decisions. The chapter also considers Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent politics and Walter Benjamin’s perspective on violence within the law. The instrumental convenience of separating law and politics is examined, emphasizing the role of law in constraining politics and power. As Judith Shklar observes, the threefold approach to law in Western tradition – apolitical law, depoliticized law following parliamentary processes, and positive law imposed by hegemonic power – reflects different bases of objectification. The power of natural law, both enhancing and restricting individual freedom, is explored in the context of its capacity to disassociate from politics. The chapter concludes by discussing the broader implications of objectification in fields such as science, technology, and economics, emphasizing the impact on public trust and the diminishing space for ethical and political considerations in contemporary democracy.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.