Trafficking in the Rule of Law.

Powerful western nations (who constitute the primary markets for trafficked labor) are engaged in pressuring "source" countries to standardize their legal definitions of and responses to the problem of human trafficking. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) among law enforcement and human rights officials involved in the effort to improve BiH's "rating" in a US State Department evaluation of its anti-trafficking measures. It undertakes what Paul Kahn has referred to as a cultural study of law as it emerges through politically charged interactions in an "emergent democracy. Rather than examining the effectiveness of anti-trafficking legal efforts themselves, the paper seeks to elucidate the mechanisms through which legal change is wrought, and the specific cultural assumptions embedded in both international and local anti-trafficking laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]