In the aftermath of four Yugoslav wars during the course of the 1990s, South Eastern Europe is “now a vast political laboratory on top of a mass grave.”¹ Ongoing efforts at reconstruction have focused on rebuilding the security of governments, states, and the region as a whole. These efforts, however, have devoted less attention to dimensions of human security—securing freedom from want and freedom from fear and establishing and strengthening the rule of law—that enhance protections for the region’s most vulnerable populations in their daily lives.² It is in this context that South Eastern Europe, and especially the...

Trafficking for sexual exploitation involves an exchange transaction of gifts, services, and/or objects. The elements and terms of the exchange reflect the relations and forms of organization of the particular economic system in which the transaction occurs. In traditional cultures and local economies, women may be exchanged as gifts to create alliances, to make peace, and to ensure the continuity of lineages.¹ In market economies, women supply services for the financial benefit of sellers (others) who try to maximize their own profits by controlling the exchange relationship. In a global market system, commodified bodies are exchanged across large distances to...

Over the last five to eight years, a large and growing number of state, quasi-state, and non-state actors have been actively involved in combating trafficking in the Western Balkans.¹ Many of these actors respond to human trafficking as if it were a social and criminal phenomenon that can be isolated for moral condemnation and addressed separately from other problems. Such efforts are destined to fail because the connection between trafficking and poverty, unemployment, discrimination, violence in the family, and the demand in countries of destination is undeniable. The more effective responses to trafficking are those that address these structural problems...

Human trafficking has become a top priority of the international community in the past decade and the Balkans a key target in anti-trafficking efforts. Anti-trafficking policy exemplifies a transnational policy by Mitchell Orenstein’s definition, one that is “developed, diffused, and implemented with the direct involvement of global policy actors and coalitions at or across the international, national, or local levels of governance.”¹ In the case of anti-trafficking in the Balkans, transnational policy actors have not only been involved directly in all stages of the policy process but one might argue that anti-trafficking policy would not exist without the participation of...

A March 2005 report released jointly by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOHCHR), and UNICEF analyzed two mutually exclusive hypotheses on trafficking into the Western Balkans. Statistics gathered by border police, governments, police anti-trafficking units, and shelters indicated that trafficking to the region had plummeted in recent years. Nongovernmental organization leaders and some experts within the United Nations countered that human trafficking had not declined. Instead, they argued, trafficking had shifted its guise and moved underground.¹

If the nongovernmental experts were correct, human trafficking in the...

Albania’s transition from dictatorship to a pluralistic system of government has been fraught with challenges—chief among them the emergence of a powerful human trafficking industry. Albania has been an origin, transit, and destination country for the trafficking of women and children for many years.¹ The constant presence of poverty, unemployment, low levels of education within families, an absence of reliable information about trafficking, and meager support from state and social institutions has fostered an environment in which Albanian women and children become easy prey for Albanian criminal gangs. The lucrative trafficking of Albanians, as well as foreigners, has been...

Trafficking in human beings is a complex and multidimensional crime that has expanded worldwide. Human trafficking has become the world’s third largest criminal business, after trafficking in drugs and weapons. South Eastern European countries are particularly affected as countries of origin, transit, and final destination of trafficked persons. Every year an estimated 175,000 persons—mainly women—are trafficked from, to, or through South Eastern European countries, including the countries of the Western Balkans, and held in conditions amounting to slavery.

There are social, legal, and economic reasons for the increase in trafficking involving South Eastern European countries. Trafficking is largely...

According to the 2005Human Security Reportreleased by the Human Security Centre, human trafficking is “so widespread and so damaging to its victims that it has become a cause of human insecurity” on a global scale.¹ The report’s conclusion is based on information from and arguments of leading government agencies and intergovernmental organizations many of which are discussed in this volume, such as the U.S. State Department, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and the International Organization for Migration.² However, with few exceptions, these same agencies and organizations have failed to facilitate, and at times have impeded, steps toward...