Fascism's Doppelgänger: Trafficking, Underworldmaking, and the Imaginative Geography of Liberalism

This article investigates the role of trafficking narratives in early-twentieth-century liberal internationalist world-making. Focusing on the League of Nations' anti-trafficking campaign, I demonstrate how these efforts contributed to such liberal worldmaking through what I call under worldmaking. I use Edward Said's notion of imaginative geography to explore the League's fixation with the relationship between global civility and global criminality, treating it as an adaptation of imperialism's Manichaean geopolitics for the new internationalist age. I focus on the Traffic in Women and Children's committee's process of knowledge production, arguing that the parallel trafficking underworld they worked so hard to capture also shared figurative entailments with antisemitic conspiracy theories. At the same time, it appealed directly to fascists in Europe. I conclude with some thoughts on anti-trafficking narratives today and suggest that rather than approaching fascism as a discrete response to the failures of liberal capitalism, we should look more closely at the figurative and aesthetic qualities that fascism and liberalism share.