Human trafficking and organised crime

The Institute of Social Studies is Europe's longest-established centre of higher education and research in development studies. Post-graduate teaching programmes range from six-week diploma courses to the PhD programme. Research at ISS is fundamental in the sense of laying a scientific basis for the formulation of appropriate development policies. The academic work of ISS is disseminated in the form of books, journal articles, teaching texts, monographs and working papers. The Working Paper series provides a forum for work in progress which seeks to elicit comments and generate discussion. The series includes the research of staff, PhD participants and visiting fellows, and outstanding research papers by graduate students. For further information contact

Human Security and the Governmentality of Neo-Liberal Mobility

Transnational migration and its implications for human security as a policy field constitute one of the most complex issues of our time. Current experiences of displacement and security spans between a cyber world characterized by hyper mobility of finance, technology, information and the ‘cosmopolitan’ values of a ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) to the world of human trafficking and smuggling of migrants and refugees as a mode of mobility adopted by people who cross borders on foot, by boat, trucks and planes who are often abandoned to die when arrangements break down (Eschbach/Hagan/Rodriguez, 2001; El-Cherkeh/Hella, 2004). The extant legal vacuum reflects unresolved conflicts of interest at different levels and poses a great challenge to the right to mobility as an expression of the liberal ideal of individual liberty

Development ethics through the lenses of caring, gender, and human security.

Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction (psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics