The Emotional Leviathan — How Street-Level Bureaucrats govern Human Trafficking Victims

Abstract

Comprehending the term “victim of human trafficking” as a classification in the sense of Ian Hacking (1999), we studied mundane institutional practices aimed at the classification of migrant sex workers as “victims of human trafficking” in German police offices, victim counselling centres, and in trials. Following the tradition of an ethnography of the state (Lipsky 1980, Dubois 2010), we regard the practices of so called street-level bureaucrats not as merely implementing national policies and legislation, but rather as producing governmental action as such in the first place. In doing so, institutional practices have to be understood and analysed within a bureaucratic context with emergent and deployed bodies of hybrid knowledge and discourse, which are the effect of and at the same time producing subjectifications that are deeply emotionally embedded. The bureaucrats’ emotions and beliefs actually inform the identification processes and the management of trafficking victims. Thus, instead of constituting a Weberian rational authority who solves problems exclusively in accordance with organisational and legal guidelines, the bureaucrat in our study appears to act according to modes of knowing that are always already situated within a specific social setting. This, we argue, changes the picture of governance. Thus, we shall theorise practices of governance that draw on emotional logics and affective rationalities within emergent state discourses and the ‘politics of pity’ (Aradau 2004) and, additionally, offer a new perspective on how to study the role of emotions, values, and affects in legal and bureaucratic classificatory practices.