Human Trafficking and Jurisdictional Exceptionalism in the Global Fishing Industry: A Case Study of Singapore

Abstract

This paper traces emerging legal-spatial practices of exclusion of trafficked migrant fishers from the human and labour rights protections of anti-trafficking. I introduce the idea of jurisdictional exceptionalism–that is practices that invoke particular demarcations of sovereignty to avoid protection responsibilities–to conceptualise these geographies of exclusion. Singapore, as a transit state for trafficked migrant fishers and location of labour agencies managing their contracts, is drawn on to illustrate one key spatial tactic of jurisdictional exceptionalism; namely, deflection. The discussion engages with recent critical and feminist geopolitical insights concerning the production and perpetuation of (in)security through legal-geographical exclusions.