Modern Slavery and Migration: A Conversation on the Production of Invasive Figures and Racist Imaginaries

What makes up the figure of the ‘modern slave’ and why does it appear so regularly in discussions over both climate change and migration? In this conversation, Nandita Dutta and Maurice Stierl discuss how the modern slave emerges in their respective fields of research, what political function it plays and what colonial, racial and spatial imaginaries it is embedded in. This figure is not innocent – it marks out racialised others, chaotic places ‘elsewhere’ and legitimises specific moral and political interventions, often in the name of both protection and deterrence. In this conversation, the authors point to the risk of reproducing discourses about affected groups and populations as ‘slaves’, whose ‘vulnerability’ can quickly turn into a ‘threat’ if they dare to move across borders.