20 years since the negotiation of the Palermo Protocol on Trafficking in 2000, the anti-trafficking field has gone from an early, almost exclusive preoccupation with sex work to addressing extreme exploitation in a range of labour sectors. While this might suggest a reduced focus on the nature of the work performed and a greater focus on the conditions under which it is performed, in reality, anti-trafficking discourse remains in the grip of polarised positions on sex work even as the carceral effects of anti-trafficking law become evident and the Swedish model of criminalising the purchase of sexual services spreads. In this article, I demonstrate how despite the recent discursive shifts to ‘modern slavery’ and ‘forced labour’, the anti-trafficking transnational legal order itself reinforces, rather than diffuses cultures of sex work exceptionalism. The growing international sex workers’ movement has offered resistance, yet a closer look at the movement and the widespread support that it has garnered for decriminalisation from international organisations, while valuable, helps reveal the greatest cost yet of anti-trafficking discourse, namely, the inability of the sex workers’ movement to produce a sophisticated theory of regulation to reduce levels of exploitation within sex work, one which is commensurate with the informality and heterogeneity of sex markets the world over. Finally, to the extent that neoabolitionist projects derive legitimacy from interventions abroad, especially in the global South, I chronicle the edifice on which it rests in one such context, namely India, to demonstrate how countries in the global South are not merely conduits for the global North’s preoccupation with moral gentrification through neo-abolitionism, but rather, that the circuits of global governmentality while influential, are highly contingent, thus producing opportunities for creative forms of mobilisation by sex workers.

自 2000 年巴勒莫人口贩运议定书谈判以来的 20 年，反人口贩运领域已经从早期几乎完全专注于性工作转变为解决一系列劳动部门的极端剥削问题。虽然这可能表明减少对所从事工作的性质的关注，而更多地关注工作的实施条件，但实际上，反人口贩运的话语仍然处于对性工作的两极分化的立场，即使反贩运法律变得明显，瑞典将购买性服务定为犯罪的模式传播开来。在本文中，我展示了尽管最近话语转向“现代奴隶制”和“强迫劳动”，但反贩运的跨国法律秩序本身如何得到加强，而不是传播性工作例外论的文化。日益增长的国际性工作者运动带来了阻力，但仔细研究该运动以及它为国际组织非刑罪化所获得的广泛支持，虽然很有价值，但有助于揭示反贩运话语的最大成本，即性工作者运动无法产生一种复杂的监管理论来减少性工作中的剥削程度，这与全世界性市场的非正式性和异质性相称。最后，就新废奴主义项目从国外干预（尤其是在全球南方）中获得合法性的程度而言，我记录了它在这样一个背景下所依赖的大厦，即印度，