Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
![handle is hein.journals/brownjwa10 and id is 135 raw text is: 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.
- Marring Vanderberg, Director of the Women's Project for Human
Rights Watch'
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 133
borders, largely in conjunction with prostitution.
- NGO Forum2
PEACEKEEPING OPERATES WITHIN A CONTEXT of neo-liberal power and capital.3 This con-
text draws on and reflects older traditions of colonialism and patriarchy that valorize
unequal treatments of race, gender, class, and culture. Although peacekeeping by mul-
tilateral 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 Peace-
keepers as individuals may face an identity crisis of masculine warrior versus feminized
peacekeeper,5 but peacekeeping as an enterprise intensifies a particular strain of neo-
liberal 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
SUMMER / FALL 2003 VOLUME X, ISSUE 1](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/brownjwa10&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order
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