Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order

Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN

Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU AND L.H.M. LING Researchers Global Change Institute / New School University
[Sex trafficking is the] dirty secret of UN interventions around the world the nasty underbelly that no one wants to confront. Marting Vanderberg, Director of the Womens Project for Human Rights Watch1 Trafficking in persons is a form of racism that is recognized as a contemporary form of slavery and is aggravated by the increase in racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The demand side in trafficking is created by a globalized market, and a patriarchal notion of sexuality. Trafficking happens within and across borders, largely in conjunction with prostitution. NGO Forum2

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PEACEKEEPING OPERATES WITHIN A CONTEXT of neo-liberal power and capital.3 This context draws on and reflects older traditions of colonialism and patriarchy that valorize unequal treatments of race, gender, class, and culture. Although peacekeeping by multilateral agencies like the United Nations (UN) may provide a crucial service by ceasing violence (at least temporarily) in conflict-ridden societies, these agencies also reinforce a neo-liberal world order that is, on the whole de-historicized, leaving in place an old colonial script in which the West saves hapless refugees from their fates.4 Peacekeepers as individuals may face an identity crisis of masculine warrior versus feminized peacekeeper,5 but peacekeeping as an enterprise intensifies a particular strain of neoliberal global governance that remains unquestioningly white, male, and bourgeois.
ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU is Lecturer and Coordinator of Graduate Internships at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, and founder and director of the Global Change Institute, an NGO headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. L.H.M. LING is a Core Faculty Member in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at New School University. Dr. Ling currently heads a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research team to study the linkage between UN peacekeeping and sex trafficking.
Copyright 2003 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs

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Take, for example, the universalism of human rights. Though the human rights discourse is much-needed in order to curb abuses on individuals throughout the world, it tends to recognize only those activities or claims made in the language of white-male rule (international law) applied to and exercised in the public-sector domain (the state). Left unheeded are those transgressions usually characterized in terms of third-world anger and frustration, desperation and despair (development), that transpire either inside the patriarchal household (domestic violence) or outside the public sector (the informal economy).6 Yet it is precisely this latter privatized and informalized economy that blurs the legal with the illicit, allowing the public order to proceed accordingly.7 As enforcers of this neo-liberal morality and commerce, UN peacekeeping allows certain identities to pleasure and profit at the expense of others. That UN peacekeepers would traffic in persons for sex is but the most superficial and obvious response to this nexus of technology, power, and capital utilized by one configuration of race, gender, and class against others. Peacekeeping, after all, aims to rebuild a war-torn society so it will function more properly in the neo-liberal world order.8 PEACEKEEPING AS A TRANSNATIONAL PROJECT Sex trafficking is a phenomenon of global proportions. An US$8 billion/year global business, it prostitutes almost four million women, girls, and boys daily.9 Crime cartels utilize high-tech equipment, including weapons of war, to defend this lucrative trade. Sex trafficking racializes and sexualizes inequities between rich and poor, North and South, men and women, and adults and children, within as well as between countries. It is no coincidence that most who are targeted for sex trafficking are considered prostitutes of color (including ethnic Caucasians from Russia and Eastern Europe) coming from poor, weak economies (even if many of those who are trafficked are welleducated), while clients are simply identified as richimplying at least a middleclass background for men and sometimes women from the North, Japan, and other wealthy economies in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Sex trafficking now increasingly involves UN peacekeepers.10 The Associated Press in Eastern Europe has reported that [UN] officers [have secretly] forged documents for trafficked women, aided their illegal transport through border checkpoints into Bosnia, and tipped off sex club owners ahead of raids.11 Apparently, Serbs and Albanians in the region can overcome political-ethnic differences to collaborate in sex trafficking, reportedly grossing US$1.5 million/week.12 Similar scenarios recur throughout the UN peacekeeping network, raising concern within the international organization itself not only for its internal management (sex trafficking directly violates the Security Councils mandates for UN peacekeeping) but also for external public rela-

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tions.13 Kathryn Bolkovac, for example, was an American working for the Virginiabased DynCorp, a private security company contracted to the International Police Task Force (IPTF) in Bosnia. She was fired after reporting to her company and the U.S. State Department that other officers had participated in a prostitution racket. In 2002, she won a case of unfair dismissal against the State Department.14 That same year, the UN held a conference in Turin, Italy on the problematic connection between prostitution, sex trafficking, and peacekeeping missions.15 To stabilize a conflict-ridden area, UN peacekeepers arrive with ample resources, prestige, and institutional power. But when the peacekeeping high command excuses prostitution and its related businesssex traffickingwith the attitude that boys will be What kind of global governance boys, they exploit such resources and goodwill, and, consequently globalize sex and violence. In- is the international community deed, sex trafficking by military personnel un- licensing in the name of peace, dermines the very notion of security, given the border-defying spread of sexually-transmitted dis- justice, and order when women, eases (STDs),16 a generation of children sired and girls, and boys are trafficked abandoned by peacekeepers,17 and the emergence daily for pleasure and profit? of sex networks such as, Nicosia-Famagusta,18 Budapest-Kosovo, 19 Dili-Darwin, 20 Phnom Penh-Bangkok,21 and the northeast triangle of Honduras-El Salvador-Guatemala.22 Sex trafficking also comes home, literally and figuratively, to haunt the domestic population with HIV/AIDS, other STDs, and child prostitution.23 Peacekeepers complicit tolerance of or active participation in sex trafficking robs local citizens of any recourse to redress their grievances. Not only have these citizens suffered the traumas of war, poverty, genocide, and dislocation but they have experienced, also, the disintegration of local governments and society. In many cases, international organizations, such as the UN, remain their only hope for a stable, responsive civil society. When this last resource fails, where can they turn? In other words, what kind of global governance is the international community licensing in the name of peace, justice, and order when women, girls, and boys are trafficked daily for pleasure and profit? SEX IN THE MAINSTREAM Mainstream analysts would answer: world order. For this reason, they subordinate sex trafficking to what they consider to be matters of higher priority, such as global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, balance of power, globalization, and so

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on. Mainstream analysts typically exile sex trafficking to related but subsidiary domains of research, such as womens studies, third-world development, and/or area studies. What results is an intellectual segregation of sex trafficking into a series of discrete, policy problems for developing economies out there, effectively erasing from view the international systems complicity in sex trafficking and/or its impact on the advanced economies in here. Disappeared are the real power politicsthat is, how the construction of identities along racial, gender, class, and cultural lines obscure global inequalities, often resulting in sex trafficking.24 It becomes reified as a description only (i.e. clients exploit for pleasure; pimps, for profit; and trafficked women remain just victims). Missing, then, are the analytical focal points for possible intervention, especially through culturally appropriate, grass-roots strategies that would enable trafficked persons to help themselves. DESIRE, NEO-LIBERALISM, AND WORLD ORDER Capital drives the neo-liberal world order. Constant restructuring through structural adjustment programs, aimed to protect or generate profits, requires retaining the publics consent; otherwise, coercion and force would need to be applied more frequently and explicitly. Herein lies the politics of neo-liberalism. Its ideology of individualism, competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and marketization combined with structural inequities that perpetuate exploitation, poverty, desperation, and despair produce, as a result, desire industries.25 These industries service and sustain the neo-liberal world order through misdirection, by convincing the public that consumption reflects individual choice and freedom rather than a larger system of rule. Desire industries do so through three conflations: 1) products and people are interchangeable, 2) private consumption serves a public good, and 3) corporate efficiency requires the commodification and (re)colonization of third-world labor, generally, and women, specifically.26 These conflations normalize racism, sexism, and neo-colonialism even as the agents of neoliberal globalizatione.g. multinational corporations, the media, and the developmental stateherald consumption as a guarantor of freedom and democracy.27 Economic crises, however, expose the racial and gendered nature of this neoliberal world order. After the fall of the Soviet empire, for example, women accounted for two-thirds of the unemployed in Russia and the former Soviet republics.28 Marked with unemployment and underemployment in the formal economy, women were ripe for sexual exploitation in the informal sector. Large and small-scale trafficking networks mushroomed to recruit women and girls from both urban and rural areas throughout the region. Hotels, airlines, and charter companies often colluded with the state, directly or indirectly, to facilitate the trafficking of women. Advertising, through

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the Internet, magazines, and tourism brochures, also collaborated in the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates based on current data that up to 500,000 women a year are brought into Western Europe and forced into the sex indus- The International Organization for Migration (IOM) try. Other estimates place the figure as high as one estimates based on current data that up to million. 29 Every eco- 500,000 women a year are brought into Western nomic unit, after all, Europe and forced into the sex industry. Other must ensure its survival under privatization and estimates place the figure as high as one million. liberalization. Where former socialist economies once provided cradle-to-grave welfare, newly capitalist enterprises now seek to streamline their budgets by eliminating workersthose deemed too old, inadequately skilled, and requiring maternity leaves and child-care expenses. Such cuts largely target women. Even those women who could find employment in the formal economy face unequal wages, job discrimination, and outright sexism in the workplace.30 In conventional development theory, fusing race with sex comes from an older 137 and widely naturalized understanding of colonialism and patriarchy.31 Nearly five centuries of Western colonialism and imperialism have left us with two, interrelated legacies: a militarized enrichment of the haves by the have-nots32 and a racializationcum-sexualization of the Other.33 As Cynthia Enloe has demonstrated, the U.S. entertainment industry propped up Carmen Miranda as a symbol of U.S.-Latin American relations precisely because she distracted attention from U.S. power politics in the region, particularly from the unholy alliance between multinational corporations such as the United Fruit Company and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).34 The term banana republic cleverly referred to the desired commodity, the CIA-corporate manipulations of regional and local politics, and the lack of fortitude shown by local states under U.S. hegemony. Today, neo-liberal globalization has defused this potent symbol of Latin American shame and U.S. hegemony into a highly successful clothing chain store. Thus, the market trumps politics, and further consolidates the neo-liberal world order. Local patriarchal elites seethed against such injustice from the West but excused their own rape and pillage of internal Others in the name of tradition, religion, development, or entitlement. National industrialization strategies institutionalized this order of female exploitation by selling women as docile, cheap, and expendable laborwhether for a factory at home, a household overseas, or a brothel anywhere.35 One rationale overrode all objections: the patriarchal family/state must be

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saved from personal or national debt. That this is only accomplished through direct, bodily sacrifice by generations of women around the world underscores the race-gender-class hierarchies that constitute the neo-liberal world order. These hierarchies silence the histories and relations of sexualized racism that ultimately link class with other structural inequalities.36 Indeed, these women and girls now believe that this is the way things are and always will be. Militarization pivots this racialized, gendered world ordering. Not only does it back capitalist patriarchy in world-order with technical muscle, but militarization also rewards its participants and advocates. For example, Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila, and Taipei all served as sites of rest Peacekeeping encapsulates and reframes and recreation (R&R), or, rather, prostitution centers, for this global political economy of colonial the U.S. military during the power relations, neo-liberal marketization, Vietnam War.37 The South Korean government even neand economic militarization. gotiated militarized prostitution as a foreign policy entice38 ment to keep U.S. troops on the peninsula. The U.S. effectively institutionalized what Japans imperial army tried to coerce during World War IIa geographically 138 diverse distribution of comfort women.39 Both local patriarchs and representatives of U.S. hegemony found common ground in profit and pleasure: on the bodies and souls of women, girls, and boys. Today, sex tourism has taken over, and trafficking travels both ways: clients find sex workers by going out there as much as sex workers seek clients by coming in here, as entertainers, artists, mail-order brides, or some other rubric.40 More recently, militarized globalization is taking place in border towns and other peripheral sites of neo-liberal production. Note, for example, how the Mexican governments new economy combined with forced migration have led to the mechanization, fragmentation, and compartmentalization of indigenous and feminized subjects (campesinos) in U.S./ Mexico export processing zones (EPZs).41 As feminized and racialized workers are driven to the border out of economic necessity, they are moved into forms of labor that objectify and mechanize their bodies. For example, one managerial method of gender surveillance is a constant pregnancy check.42 Those found pregnant are fired or laid off. In Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexicos largest maquiladora factories, countless women have been murdered or raped. Lacking protection from the state, their employers, or even basic infrastructure such as lit roads from factory to home, campesinos in southern and rural Mexico face increasing obsolescence by Mexicos neo-liberal developmental program. Yet international and multinational interests continue to collaborate with the state militaries and paramilitaries, overrunning regions

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such as Chiapas, in order to stabilize their mutual investments. Indigenous women in war-torn countries like Guatemala face another kind of invisibilization. Fearful of being identified as dissidents, guerrillas, or terrorists, they opt for anonymity which makes them more vulnerable for sex trafficking, especially in frontier areas.43 Consequently, women are caught between a lack of proof of citizenship, with which they could ask for reparation of damages (the term used in government documents), and the fear of revealing their identity as Indians, or nonwhites, thereby facing discriminatory treatment from the very governmental agencies from which they seek protection.44 Peacekeeping encapsulates and reframes this global political economy of colonial power relations, neo-liberal marketization, and economic militarization. Ever since the disastrous intervention of U.S. peacekeeping in Somalia in 1993, when gleeful Somali bandits dragged the corpse of an U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, industrialized economies have been reluctant to send in their own troops for peacekeeping missions. African Business reports that [d]eveloping nations now contribute more than 75 percent of the 30,000 troops involved in 15 missions world-wide while the U.S., Japan and the European countriessupplying scant numbers of ground troopspay 85 percent of the UNs US$3 billion peacekeeping budget.45 Thus, cash-rich, firstworld governments are subcontracting cash-poor, third-world states so to provide troops for peacekeeping operations that sustain, basically, first-world geopolitics in the name of first-world material interests. Officials like to minimize the complicity of the state and international apparatuses of power in the sex trafficking industries. For instance, Gennadi Lepenko, Chief of Interpol-Kyiv, Ukraine, claims that womens groups want to blow this [the problem of sex trafficking] all out of proportion. Perhaps this was a problem a few years ago. But its under control now.46 Yet, sex trafficking in Ukraine is undeniably profitable. Only one year prior to Lepenkos statement, local police busted a prostitution ring between Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. In March 1999, in Sevastopol, Ukraine, two men and a woman, using the firm Sight as a cover, were arrested for selling 200 Ukrainian women and girls, aged 13-25, for the sex industry in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. The traffickers were intercepted as they attempted to send more women to Turkey by ship. The traffickers received US$2000 for each woman. The women were held in bondage until they repaid their expenses. If they complained their debt was tripled.47 Such profits invariably beget violence. This violence, in turn, falls unevenly on those branded expendable. The globalization of desire industries, like sex trafficking, spreads such human branding throughout the world.48 But capitals constant search for more sources of cheap labor alters the subjects of branding and their internal hier-

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archies. As the quotes below illustrates, Russian women in the Mediterranean, for example, command higher prices for sex work than earlier waves of prostitutes. Clients who, twenty years ago, considered the bodies of Filipinas, Arabs, and Latin Americans as exotic and desirable now view them as black laborers, good enough only for domestic work.49 Desire industries use up women, physically and emotionally, necessitating fresh supplies of women on a regular basis, which keeps the recruitment and trafficking of women so profitable.50 Multiple methods of recruitment for sexual exploitation such as media advertisements, marriage agencies, mail-order-bride services, or friends and acquaintances, keep sex trafficking a multi-billion enterprise in the world economy. Yet the trafficked persons the ones usually excluded from all this moneymakingare blamed for the violence, coercion, and exploitation that they endure daily. How do the trafficked themselves see their role in the desire industries? Such a perspective can be heard in Cyprus, a Mediterranean gateway for prostitution and sex trafficking and also the worlds oldest site for UN peacekeeping. These womens voices underscore the coercion, desperation, and assault on human dignity that sex trafficking entails:
I met an impressario through a friend of mine who worked in Greece before. I went to him he asked me to pay him $2000 dollars and he promised me a lot of money in three months. And here I was in this cabaret with an old man. He wanted me to go with clients for consummation, he said. When I realized what he meant I said, I do not want to. He screamed at me, What do you want to do? Just sit around?! I entered Turkey along with 13 other women. We came here with a Russian guy who knew where to take us through the port of Trabzon. Once we arrived at the border, two Turkish guys took us to a cabaret where guys walked in and picked us up foryou-know-what (Merriam, 27-year-old Russian sex worker). Several of us women from Russia, Georgia, and the Ukraine were told that if we wanted to go to Turkey we could make a lot of money. We just had to pay $2,500 to this Chechen guy and he can get us visas. Thats what we did. And I ended up in Laleli with 20 other women forced to work in a hotel without any freedom. I worked there for 2 months and then I escaped. I made enough money, but I hated my boss who charged the clients so much money because I was Russian and he gave me 1/3 of what I was earning (Anna, 25-year-old Russian sex worker).51

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Only systematic constructions of identity at a macro-structural level could allow such blatant asymmetries in profits and exploitation to be tolerated, maintained, and perpetuated. IDENTITIES: RACIALIZATION OF MASCULINITIES AND FEMININITIES Ashis Nandy has written on the impact of British colonialism on colonizer and colo-

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nized alike.52 An underdeveloped heart, he discovered, chilled both parties. The colonizer aimed to justify his violence against the Other, while the colonized sought to prove his manhood to the former. The resulting exaggerated or hyper-masculinity denigrated all associations with femininity: women, feelings, intellection, welfare, and homosexuality. The interaction between British colonialism and Indian culture, Nandy emphasized, brought out recessive strains in Because such liberation typically conflates coneach. Within Indian culture, hyper-mascu- quest with desirewhether it is defined as national linity brought to the security, monetary reward, or sexual release foreground a stylized, prostitution and sex trafficking become an almost warrior esthete that elites used to mimic logical conduit. British manhood. Within British culture, hyper-masculinity heightened undercurrents of sexism, racism, and a false sense of cultural homogeneity that invariably spilled into banal violence for release. Over time, these recessive strains became dominant and naturalized in both cultures. So, too, peacekeeping shares with colonialism the capacity to reconstruct identities. Peacekeeping not only keeps the peacethat is, ensures the containment of violencebut it also configures race, gender, class, and culture to suit the hyper-masculine, propertied classes of the neo-liberal world order. Jan Jindy Pettman, for instance, notes the re-masculinization of the Australian government vis--vis Asia when sending peacekeeping troops to East Timor.53 She cites an interview with Prime Minister John Howard in which he celebrates Australias renewed military muscle in East Timor, thereby shaking off the previous administrations pro-Asian, appeasement policies even while serving as deputy sheriff in the region for the United States. (Howard later retracted this statement.) We are European, Howard stated, [We are part of ] Western civilization with strong links to North America but here we are in Asia54 Indeed, the fantasy of a Western, hyper-masculinized Self rescuing the Native, (frequently a feminized Other), has long preoccupied colonial imagery.55 Historically, White men have liberated native women, to justify Western colonialism and imperialism in the guise of virile benevolence.56 One oft-cited motivation for the Bush administration to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, is to improve the lives and welfare of the local women. Interestingly, the administration made no such commitment to women in the United States or those in Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11.57 Because such liberation typically conflates conquest with desire whether it is de-

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fined as national security, monetary reward, or sexual releaseprostitution and sex trafficking become an almost logical conduit. As Cynthia Enloe and Louise Olsson have argued, peacekeepers use prostitutes and exploit women like any other soldier during wartime, although international conventions distinguish regular soldiers from UN peacekeepers.58 For example, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)a peacekeeping mission to Cambodia from 1992-1993increased local prostitution in Phnom Penh 3.5 times during its stay, with 25 percent of its peacekeepers returning home HIV positive.59 During UN missions to Somalia, the local community broadcast all over the world pictures of a Somali woman who seemed too friendly to the French soldiers.60 Race, class, and sexuality figure centrally in peacekeepers constructions of power and sex in the field. When UN peacekeepers find themselves in receiving countries, they draw on and sustain a national mythology in which bodies of color [women and men] are imagined as outside the nation and white men become the normative citizens.61 For some peacekeepers, race is a form of pleasure in ones body that is articulated by [and] through humiliation of the Other.62 Many have critiqued peacekeepings colonialist logic.63 Partha Chatterjee highlights peacekeepings normative underpinnings. Like other transnational projects, such as womens rights, these projects stem from a moral-cultural drive to spread modernity throughout the world.64 Indeed, Chatterjee claims, peacekeeping serves as an external check on the sovereign powers of the nation-state[Peacekeeping constitutes] a global civil society assessing the incomplete modernity of particular national political formations.65 Sherene Razack bluntly calls peacekeeping a civilizing mission whose moral terrain is firmly anchored in the first world.66 Despite this, most peacekeepers fervently believe in their role as containing the chaos wrought by natives in their localities, especially in post-conflict societies. [We saw our mission as] putting the region of Somalia back on the path to a normal lifestyle admitted, Colonel Labbe, a Canadian peacekeeper.67 Humanitarian efforts easily turn into naked aggression when the recipients of peacekeeping do not seem duly grateful. Canadian peacekeepers, commenting on why they killed so many Somalis, the very people they were sent to protect, reveal the violence behind peacekeeping:
I never saw a starving Somali. I never saw a grateful Somali. We were sent to help them, and they did nothing to help us. They were not even appreciative of the work we were doing for them. They just kept destroying everything [we] were building and I think that was the turning point really, for me anyhow. It was one of the big turning points against the Somalis, around mid February. I went from feeling sorry for them down to being fed up,

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thinking, Lets get out. They brought it all on themselves.68

Even within this construct of the Self as Peacekeeper white mythologies operate.69 Peacekeepers who were men of color felt pressure to conform to the implicit white standard in the field (we are superior, you are barbaric). An Aboriginal peacekeeper in the Canadian mission rationalized his killing of Somalis through two orders of racialized masculinity: The white man feared the Indian. So, too, will the black man.70 For these peacekeepers with uncertain access to dominance in the hierarchy of racialized masculinities and sexualities, their enactment of violence shows that they, too, qualify as men.71 CONCLUSION: NEED FOR NEW FOCUS AND ACTION Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN, has called for more women in peacekeeping.72 Scholars and activists reiterate the need to address, in particular, the increasing connection between peacekeeping, prostitution, and sex trafficking.73 More women personnel in peacekeeping may help, but our analysis indicates that more in-depth research is required. Specifically, there needs to be a growth in understanding about how the following processes interrelate:
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Local-Regional-Global Interactions: (a) How does the economy at local, regional, and global levelssupport or intervene in this nexus of sex and violence? (b) What are the structural and cultural implications of the UN subcontracting cash-short Third World states to provide the peacekeeping labor for what is effectively first-world geopolitics and geo-economics? (c) How do we deal with peacekeeping as a transnational project and the globalization paradox it produces: that is, peacekeeping seeks to maintain borders even as peacekeeping itself crosses them? (d) What is the relationship between sex trafficking overseas and what happens at home? Identity-Formations: (a) How do race, gender, class, and culture figure in the relationship between peacekeeping and sex trafficking, especially when applied to situations of conquest and desire? (b) Where do Self and Other stand in this discourse and what has disappeared from it? (c) How do local norms (e.g. Cambodian saying: men are gold, women are cloth), interests (e.g. need for cash), and institutions (e.g., the state, NGOs) comply with this culture of insecurity and exploitation? (d) What is the hierarchy of racialized masculinities, femininities, and sexualities at the nexus of peacekeeping and sex trafficking? (e) What is the relationship between citizenship, national rights/entitlements, and human rights especially for those who are not recognized or treated as citizens?

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Institutional Learning: (a) How can the UN learn from peacekeepings role in sex trafficking? (b) What is the organizational culture of UN peacekeeping and how does it act on race, gender, class, and culture, not only for the peacekeepers but for the civilian population as well? How can we change this organizational culture? (c) To what extent does international law set limits on or excuse the behavior of UN peacekeepers (on and off duty)? (d) What is the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots groups in this scenario? (e) How does the expert community and its policies excuse or reinforce peacekeepings role in sex trafficking? Asking these questions will help us develop an agenda for change and intervention in such desire industries. These strategies should be two-pronged: they must express local feelings/fears/voices while, at the same time, institute normative and practical change for agencies active in the peacekeeping field. Some possible venues include: puppet and street theater, comic books, and other forms of expressive art to help formerly trafficked persons speak to potential pimps, clients, and victims; training for peacekeeping troops and their commanding officers on breaking the vicious cycle between loneliness overseas and the business of trafficking in prostitution; development of curricular and other training materials for prostitutes and law enforcement personnel on how to prevent further victimization of those caught in sex trafficking. The UN, as an institution of global governance, also needs to work towards a more gender-sensitive, culturally appropriate understanding of human security in various locales. Lastly, we need to examine, in a serious and systematic manner, the complicity of national, regional, and international organizations in facilitating sex trafficking, whether implicitly, through a neo-liberal ideology that glorifies commodification, or explicitly, through developmental programs that denigrate yet exploit certain identities for the pleasure and profit of others. We live in dangerous times. The Bush administrations current shock and awe bombing campaign against Iraq demonstrates that wars may be resolved more quickly than in the past. The challenge, however, will come after the war, when occupation begins. Perhaps only U.S. troops will be involved or the UN may send a peacekeeping mission. Either way, we must make sure that women, girls, and boys will not be sacrificed at the internationalist altar of peace, order, and security in order to extend the market, privatization, and globalization. W A

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N OTES
* We are grateful to Clifferd Dick, Jeannette Graulau, Nicole Lindstromn, Ken Payumo, and Augusta del Zotto for their helpful comments on this paper. Ann-Lou Shapiro and Michael Cohen kindly read and

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commented on an earlier version of this paper. We especially thank Elizabeth Callender for making this publication possible. Our thanks, also, to Keith Stanski for his insightful and prompt editing. We assume full responsibility, of course, for the contents herein. 1. T. Domi, UN prostitution scandal: the UN mission in Bosnia comes under fire for allegedly trying to cover up a prostitution scandal. Institute for War and Peace Reporting 21 July 2000. 2. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, 27 August -1 September, 2001. 3. In this article, we focus on multilateral peacekeeping only, although our argument applies to peacekeeping by individual states as well. 4. Malkii cited in Sherene Razack, Clean Snows of Petawawa: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia. Cultural Anthropology 15(1) 2000: 5. 5. See, for example, Volker Frankes examination of psychological dissonance experienced by U.S. peacekeepers in Somalia and Kosovo, compared with their military training at West Point. Franke, Volker. Forthcoming. The social identity of peacekeeping. In Thomas W. Britt and Amy B. Adler (eds), The Psychology of the Peacekeeper. Westport, CT: Praeger. See, also, Whitworth, Sandra. Forthcoming. Militarized masculinities and the politics of peacekeeping: the Canadian Case. In Ken Booth, (ed.) Security, Community, Emancipation. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. 6. For this reason, some human rights activists and scholars now argue that economic well-being should be considered a human right. See, for example, Fortman, Bas de Gaay and Berma K. Goldewijk, God and the Goods (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1998). 7. See, for example, Kimberly Chang, and L.H.M. Ling, Globalization and its Intimate Other: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong. In Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring, (London: Routledge, 2000): 27-43. 8. Peacekeeping activities include military and police activities; protecting and delivering humanitarian assistance; offering negotiation and good offices; strengthening the rule of law; training and restructuring of local police forces, monitoring human rights; voter education and other electoral assistance; and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants. UN 2002. Women, Peace, and Security. Study submitted by the Secretary-General pursuant to Security Council resolution 1325 (New York: United Nations, 2000). 9. See, for example: International Organisation for Migration (IOM) 1996. Trafficking in children: exploitation across borders. Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin (10). Geneva: International Organization for Migration; IOM 1997a. Trafficking of Women to Countries of the European Union: Characteristics, Trends and Policy Issues. Paper presented at the Conference on Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation, Vienna June 1996; IOM 1997b. Prostitution in Asia Increasingly Involves Trafficking. Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin (15). (Geneva: IOM, 2001). Trafficking in Migrants Quarterly Bulletin special issue April (Geneva: IOM). 10. Actual numbers of those trafficked by UN peacekeepers are hard to come by given the clandestine nature of the enterprise. Nonetheless, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has reported on peacekeepers illicit activities in this area for different parts of the world, particularly Eastern Europe. See the IOMs website (http://www.iom.int/). 11. William J. Kole and Aida Cerkez-Robinson, UN Police Accused of Involvement in Prostitution in Bosnia. Associated Press, 28 June 2001. 12. Adriatik Kelmendi, Kosovo Prostitution Flourishes: UN Struggles to Break Up Lucrative Prostitution Racket. BCR (230) 28 March 2001. 13. Times of India UN Peacekeepers Fuelling Women Trafficking. 11 April 2001. 14. Tony Robson, Bosnia: the United Nations, Human Trafficking and Prostitution. World Socialist Web Site 21 August 2002. <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/aug2002/bosn-a21.shtml> 15. Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) and United International Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI). Trafficking, Slavery, and Peacekeeping: the Balkan Case. Conference for International Experts. Turin, Italy. 19-20 May 2002. 16. Stephan Elbe, HIV/AIDS and International Security. Paper Presented at the Workshop on Peace-

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keeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 17. Clifferd Dick, UNTAC Babies: Sex and Power among Cambodias International Humanitarian Community. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2000. 18. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, Violence and the Desire Industries: What Peace Means for Women in Post-Conflict States. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 19. Nicole Lindstrom, White Slavery: Framing UN Peacekeeping and Prostitution Among Local and International Anti-trafficking NGOs in the Balkans. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 20. Jan Jindy Pettman, Manly Foreign Policy: Australian Peacekeepers in East Timor. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 21. Nunlada Punyarut, After Peacekeeping: the Phnom Penh-Bangkok Sex Network. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 22. Jeannette Graulau, The Sexiest UN Vacations: Sex and Peacekeeping Operations in Guatemala. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 23. Augusta Del Zotto, Suburban Desires: How American Citizens Benefit from UN Peacekeepers Sideline Business of Trafficking Women and Youth. Paper presented at the workshop on Peacekeeping and Prostitution at the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, 23 March 2002. 24. See, for example, Whitworth, Sandra. Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping. In Edward Moxon-Browne, (ed) A Future for Peacekeeping?, (London: Macmillan, 1998): 176-191. 25. Anna M. Agathangelou, forthcoming. The Global Political Economy of Sex. (London: Palgrave Macmillan). 26. Anna M. Agathangelou, Sexing Democracy in International Relations: Migrant Sex and Domestic Workers in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. In Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations, (New York: Routledge, 2002): 142-169. 27. A. Fuat Firat and Nikhilesh Dholakia. Consuming people. (London: Routledge, 2000). . 28. Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay, and Kathryn Pinnick. No more heroines? (London : Routledge, 1996); Francine du Plessix Gray. Soviet Women. (New York: Doubleday: 1990). 29. Julie Hyland, Explosive Growth Internationally in Trafficking of Women and Children for Sex Trade. (World Socialist Web Site 8 June 2000). <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/trafj08.shtml> 30. Nanette and Mueller Funk (eds) Gender Politics and Post-Communism. (New York: Routledge, 1993). Rai Shirin, Hilary Pilkington, and Annie Phizacklea (eds) Women in the Face of Change. (London: Routledge, 1992). 31. See, for example, Ronald Hyam, Empires and Sexuality. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990). 32. See, for example, Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents. (New York: Norton, 2002) and Susan George, The Lugano report. (London: Pluto Press, 1990). 33. See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995). 34. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 35. L.H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)., See also Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality. (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 36. Agathangelou, forthcoming, op.cit. 37. Jindy Jan Pettman, Worlding Women. (London: Routledge, 1996); Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, Money, and Morality. (London: Zed Books, 1990). 38. Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies. (New York: Columbia University Press,1997). 39. Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. Comfort Women. New York: Columbia University Press. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 1997. Special issue on The comfort women: Colonialism, War, and Sex. 5(1) Spring.

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40. See, for example: Beverley Mullings, Fantasy Tours: Exploring the Global Consumption of Caribbean Sex Tourisms. In New forms of consumption, Mark Gottdiener (ed), 227-250. Boulder, Co: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., and Lim, Lin Lean (ed.) 1998. The Sex Sector. (Geneva: International Labor Office). 41. Anna M. Agathangelou and Tamara Spira. Militarization and Economic Restructuring: The Politics of Gender and Race in the Former Yugoslavia and the U.S.-Mexico border. Forthcoming. 42. Elvia R. Arriola, Voices from the Barbed Wires of Despair. De Paul Law Review, 49, 2000 :729815. 43. Norwegian Refugee Council. 2001. Global Internally Displaced People Database, December. 44. Graulau, op.cit.. 45. UN Peacekeepers: Warriors or Victims? African Business January 2001. <http:// dspace.dial.pipex.com/icpubs/ab/jan01/cover1.htm> 46. Lepenko quoted in Donna M. Hughes, The Natasha Trade-the Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women. Journal of International Affairs 9 2000. 47. Ibid., 6, citing Newsline 3(2). 48. Kateryna Levchenko, Combat of Trafficking in Women and Forced Prostitution: Ukraine, Country Report. (Vienna, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, 1999). Barry, Kathleen. Female sexual slavery. (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 49. Agathangelou, forthcoming, op.cit.. 50. Ibid., 6. 51. These interviews come from Agathangelou, forthcoming, op. cit.. 52. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. (Delhi: Oxford, 1988). 53. Jan Jindy Pettman. Manly Foreign Policy: Australian Peacekeepers in East Timor, 2002 op. cit. 54. Quoted in Pettman, Ibid., 5. 55. See, for example, L.H.M. Ling, The monster within: what Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter can tell us about terror and desire in a post-9/11 world. Talk given at the Humanities Center, (Harvard University, 7 March 2003). 56. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson and I. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997): 271-299. 57. Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Afghani Womens Resistance Organization: Bin Laden is Not Afghanistan 14 September 2001 <http://www.ucolick.org/~de/WTChit/ RAWA.html> 58. L. Olsson, Gendering UN Peacekeeping. (Uppsala University: Department of Peace and Conflict Resolution, 1996). 59. Bridget Byrne, Rachel Marcus, and Tanya Power-Stevens, Gender, Conflict, and Development: volume II, case studies: Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Algeria, Somalia, Guatemala and Eritrea. Bridge Report, No. 35, 12. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands, 1996). 60. Ibid., 102. 61. Razack, op.cit., 2. 62. A. P. Farley, The Black Body as Fetish Object. Oregon Law Review 76 1997: 457: 535. 63. Razack, op.cit.; Olsson, op. cit.. 64. Partha Chatterjee, Beyond the Nation? Or Within? Social Text 56(16)3 1998: 67-70. 65. Ibid., 67. 66. Razack, op.cit., 5. 67 Quoted in Brown, Major Russell R. Voluntary Statement of Major Brown, Electronic file, control no. 000762. In Information Legacy: A Compedium of Source Material. (Ottawa: Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia, 26 April 1993). 68. Quoted from Donna Winslow, The Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia:A Socio-Cultural Inquiry. A Study Prepared for the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia, (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1997): 237-238. 69. Razack, op.cit., 5.

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70. Tony Hall, Who Silenced Clayton Matchee? We Did. Canadian Forum (April 1997): 5-6. 71. An indication of this racialized masculinization and sexualization come from this Canadian Airborne Regiments initiation hazing rituals, including homophobic practices, which were televised. In one of the clips, a Black corporal was tied to a tree, sprinkled with flour, referred to as Michael Jacksons secret, symbolically anally raped, and required to crawl on all fourswith the letters I love the KKK written on [his] shoulder (Razack, op.cit., 9). 72. Kofi Annan, Annan Urges Security Council to Boost Role of Women in Peacekeeping. (New York: UN Press release, 2002) [cited 24/03 2003]. Available from http://www.un.org/apps/news/ story.asp?NewsID=5180&Cr=women&CR1=peace#. 73. Louise Olsson and Torun Tryggestad (eds). Women and International Peacekeeping. (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

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