Africa After Neo-Abolition: Asylum Politicization, Expert Testimony, and the Legacy of Anti-Trafficking Advocacy

African trafficking survivors struggle with anti-immigrant rhetoric and migration securitization in throughout the Global North. Globalization has elevated the importance of documentation; individuals fleeing trafficking face high thresholds to prove captive, coerced, or imprisoned status. This talk explores asylum politicization in Europe and North America and the role of millennial anti-trafficking advocacy in resisting it. Asylum claims (from Togo, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria) provide unique insight into how trafficking survivors struggle for recognition as social persons. West African case histories show how experts and lawyers in the US and UK mobilize documentation to resist anti-migration policy.