Metaphors in the US Trafficking in Persons Report

Abstract

The paper analyses metaphor use in the annual US Department of State Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which assesses to what degree national governments around the world comply to the "minimum standards" defined in the US federal Trafficking Victims Protection (Reauthorization) Act. Through a discourse analytic approach, the eight reports from the Bush administration years (2001-08) are scrutinized from a perspective of global governance: How they construct binaries of good and evil, of freedom and slavery, and of the civilized versus the barbaric, binaries that serve to legitimate global interventionist policies. The theoretical framework for the paper is Wendy Brown's writings on victim and tolerance discourse.

Keywords: metaphor, trafficking, TIP, slavery discourse