Global Human Smuggling

Completely revised and updated: an essential edited collection of essays on global human smuggling.

Migrant smuggling is now more entrenched than ever in many regions around the world, with efforts to combat it both largely unsuccessful and often counterproductive. In Global Human Smuggling, editors Luigi Achilli and David Kyle bring together up-to-date contributions from a wide array of interdisciplinary scholars on the most important issues related to this global phenomenon.

Contributors explore human smuggling in several nuanced forms across diverse regions, examining its deep historical, social, economic, and cultural roots as well as its broad political consequences. This volume represents a cutting-edge chronicle of the state of human smuggling today, its many complexities not easily reduced to simple moral narratives, and how researchers uncover the lives it affects, both directly and indirectly. Just as migrants cross borders for a variety of reasons, many of those involved in migrant smuggling activities have an equally diverse set of motivations and organizations, ranging from those helping people escape persecution and violence to transnational criminal syndicates preying on the vulnerabilities of migrants attempting to leave their countries.

Building on the pioneering work of its previous two editions, this new volume introduces contributions organized by the themes of control, complexity, and creativity. Spanning issues around the world, the essays in this essential collection cover topics such as global migrant smuggling networks, government responses, multinational initiatives against human trafficking for sexual exploitation, representations of human smuggling in mainstream narratives of migration, and more. With nineteen new contributors, the third edition of Global Human Smuggling represents the progress of human smuggling research on every continent and offers a rare research-based and conceptual framework for the study of this critical global issue.