Anti-Trafficking Efforts and Civil Conflicts

ABSTRACT

The issue of human trafficking has received considerable attention in recent years. Despite strong cooperation among countries on the global fight against this gross violation of human rights, differences in national anti-trafficking policy and practices undermine the efficacy of international cooperation on trafficking in persons. This paper seeks to understand determinants of national efforts devoted to the eradication of human trafficking. It argues that civil conflicts impede anti-trafficking efforts of states for their adverse effects on national governments’ abilities and resources to fight against trafficking in persons. Analyses based on data coming from 173 countries over the 2003–2015 period demonstrate that civil conflicts deteriorate anti-trafficking efforts of countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Human trafficking
• civil conflict
• capabilities
• anti-trafficking efforts

Notes

¹ According to the latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report issued by the U.S. State Department, countries that do not ratify the Palermo Protocol include Bhutan, Iran, Marshall Islands, North Korea, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Republic of the Congo, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Yemen (USDOS, 2020).

² According to the Palermo Protocol, a person is accepted as a victim of trafficking even when exploitation was intended.

³ The temporal domain of this study is chosen based upon the availability of the dependent variable, coming from Cho et al. (2014) and Cho (2015).

⁴ The threshold for regime categories is chosen following the suggestion from the Center for Systemic Peace webpage over the Polity Project (https://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html).

⁵ An additional model is run with the variable, Rule of Law, for which data come from the World Bank’s Governance Indicators (World Bank, 2019). Results in the Appendix show that the main independent variable of this study, Civil Conflict, keeps its statistically significant effect in the expected direction.

⁶ I include GDP instead of GDP Per Capita since it is a measure for state capability which is more related to my argument on anti-trafficking performances of national governments. However, in the Appendix, I reported regression results for the main model by replacing GDP with GDP Per Capita. The results for the key independent variable are consistent with the main findings.

⁷ Country-specific fixed effects are not controlled in this estimation since estimating the model with temporally lagged dependent variable and country fixed effects leads to biased results in a short panel (Nickell, 1981). However, a model is run with country fixed effects and reported in the Appendix, showing that the effect of civil conflicts on countries’ anti-trafficking efforts is still negative and significant after including country-fixed effects.

⁸ I am grateful to one of the reviewers who suggested to use endogenous-treatment effects regression to address the selection issue in this study.