Emerging in the early 2000s, following the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the US-led anti-trafficking movement is a sprawling, multipronged global effort. Through its public service announcements, ads in airports and hotels, documentary films, and myriad other media, many Americans are now familiar with human trafficking as a practice and problem. Elena Shih’s Manufacturing Freedom offers a brilliantly comprehensive analysis of this movement’s long shadow by following another of its products—“slave-free jewelry”—from its sites of consumption in the United States to its sites of “virtuous production” (p.3) at Freedom Unchained (FU) in Beijing, China, and Cowboy Rescue (CR) in Bangkok, Thailand. At these American-run, Christian-oriented organizations, their (predominantly white) leaders and volunteers recruit sex workers (who they often conflate with sex trafficking victims) away from the sex industry and into their rehabilitative work programs, which train and pay them to conduct basic jewelry manufacturing.

Drawing from nearly 15 years of ethnographic research, Shih argues that by framing this vocational training as “victim rehabilitation,” and by “[c]laiming that jewelry represents a proxy commodity for freedom from enslavement as well as a virtuous wage,” CR and FU import racialized redemptive labor by replacing the wage-labor exchange with “affective commitments between white First World rescuers and their purported victims in Asia” (p.4, emphasis in original). But while these commitments provide a satisfying antidote to moral panics about global sex work and sex trafficking, they often “clash with and betray the lives of migrant women workers in the Global South” (p.3). To illustrate this argument (which she introduces and situates theoretically in the Introduction and Chapter 1), Shih follows the workers through their typical days at FU and CR (Chapter 2) and into their after-hours activities (Chapter 3).

Shih then broadens her lens to examine how FU and CR interact with local sex, labor, and migrant worker struggles and with broader anti-trafficking-related policy goals and nation-state politics in China, Thailand, the United States, and beyond. She argues here that “differing political economic relations in China and Thailand shed light on how market-based social movement organizations mobilize resources in different political economic environments” (p.5). To illustrate, Chapter 4 shows how authoritarian state power shapes transnational anti-trafficking efforts in China in ways that preclude opportunities for labor solidarity. In contrast, Chapter 5 shows that in Thailand, a combination of market forces regarding sexual commerce, mass tourism, and the “anti-trafficking rescue industry” (p.23) renders the country ripe for market-based anti-trafficking interventions involving state and NGO collusion. Chapter 6 then turns to the afterlife of these vocational rehab programs; by following four women who left them, readers learn that jewelry making is not a highly transferable skill, particularly outside of the organizations’ “marketplace of morality” (p. 178). Altogether, Shih’s research illuminates how slave-free jewelry-making programs create new forms of reliance on American aid, while trading the women’s dependence on the sale of sex for that on the sale of jewelry. The concluding chapter thus offers broader lessons about the anti-trafficking movement, worker resistance and organizing, supply chains, and anti-trafficking efforts’ redistributive possibilities and limits.

Manufacturing Freedom provides a wide-ranging and deeply insightful analysis of the global anti-trafficking movement that illuminates the promises and perils of ethical consumption—and of “slave free goods” more specifically. Labor organizers have long demanded comprehensive, structural solutions to worker exploitation and poverty, and, at first glance, CR and FU address many of these issues. While their wages are not high, they offer the women childcare, health and other benefits, weekends off, and, in China, housing in dorm-style accommodations—all of which, Shih carefully acknowledges, are generally not available to low-wage, migrant workers. But readers also learn that CR’s and FU’s worker benefits come with a steep price: in addition to making jewelry, the women must engage in “other kinds of virtuous work as calculable parts of their salaries” (p.58, emphasis in original).

This “repentant labor” includes church attendance and Bible study, along with adherence to an array of restrictive dating and socializing rules; in Beijing, the women also must live under a “house mom’s” supervision and comply with a curfew. Shih situates this additional labor as part of a broader redemptive project that combines worker-rehabilitation with moral rehabilitation for engagement in sex work. To me, these exchanges of benefits for religious proselytization and personal scrutiny were deeply reminiscent of welfare programming in the United States. As scholars such as Anna Marie Smith, Gwendolyn Mink, Dorothy Roberts, and many others have shown, these programs have long involved morally and sexually regulating poor women, and poor women of color in particular. By importing these techniques to China and Thailand, Shih’s work indicates how market-based anti-trafficking efforts provide new articulations of American empire and “fortify structures of racialized global capitalism” (p. 5).

Yet FU and CR do not pursue their moral agenda alone. States and international organizations are also complicit in efforts to rescue and rehabilitate sex workers, while, ironically, limiting workers’ rights and freedoms. Acting to protect capital’s interests in labor, China has largely co-opted the anti-trafficking movement by “selectively defining trafficking using exceptionally narrow categories” (p. 117). Here, “trafficking in persons” focuses mainly on women and children (particularly in kidnapping cases) and excludes labor exploitation, all of which is part of a long tradition “of stymying labor unrest of any kind” (p. 118). In contrast, various political-economic factors render the Thai government eager and willing to accommodate ventures such as “anti-sex trafficking reality tourism.” Offered by diverse outlets ranging from churches to adventure expedition companies, these commercial tours “focus primarily on painting a picture of rampant sexual slavery and the heroic campaigns that aim to curtail them” (p. 144).

Taken together, Manufacturing Freedom’s analysis of slave-free jewelry and other anti-trafficking projects contributes to a long line of sex work and critical trafficking scholarship that illuminates states’ and anti-trafficking organizations’ reluctance to acknowledge sex workers’ agency. In Shih’s book, readers learn that women often leave the sex industry to join FU or CR for a range of complicated reasons; however, they often resist their redemptive projects by, for example, helping each other meet jewelry production quotas and by clandestinely visiting their former workplaces to see their friends. Sex workers also resist anti-trafficking rescue-and-rehab efforts through organizations such as Empower, a peer-run organization in Thailand that offers resources and education and that calls for “rights, not rescue,” and “solidarity, not sewing machines” (p. 152). In 2006, Empower even founded the “Can-Do Bar,” a cooperative, worker-owned establishment modeling “the exemplary labor practices that the group felt were missing from the industry” (p. 152). Yet these efforts have received far less attention from many state agencies and NGOs, thereby indicating another discomfiting irony. Despite its emphasis on freedom, the mainstream anti-trafficking movement has little regard for sex workers’ own demands to address precarity, dangerous working conditions, and exploitative management (among other issues)—all of which limit workers’ freedom in a range of other sectors.

With this in mind, I was particularly taken with the book’s thought-provoking question in the final chapter, which I paraphrase here: what would happen if we redistributed the revenue from rescue-and-rehab-oriented anti-trafficking efforts to sex workers themselves? These resources are considerable: in 2021, CR and FU alone had combined gross receipts of $3.3 million (p. 197). In response to the question, Shih lists a variety of options, ranging from universal basic income to supporting efforts to decriminalize sex work, among many others. While I wholeheartedly support these efforts (and have argued in favor of many of them in my own research about organizing for sex worker rights), I could not help but wonder about their political feasibility. This felt particularly apt at the time of writing, when the Trump administration was dismantling various federal agencies and programs, thereby putting at risk current (limited) worker protections—to say nothing of international anti-trafficking efforts.

Certainly, Shih could not have anticipated this political moment as she researched and wrote this book, so I am curious about how her work may help us think through and enhance worker power going forward, particularly at a time of great polarization and media fragmentation. Since Americans increasingly spend time on social media platforms—which both fuel human trafficking conspiracies (think: Pizza-gate) and help the anti-trafficking movement disseminate information—I wondered why Shih did not consider their role in the life of slave-free jewelry. While she indicated that some workers had access to smartphones and other digital technologies and platforms, this was presumably limited (especially in China, which heavily restricts social media, especially from the West). To what extent, then, did organizations like FU, CR, and others in this space (to say nothing of organizations like Empower) rely on social media platforms to disseminate their products and messages, and to what effect?

Of course, a digital ethnography is well beyond the scope of Shih’s already vast project, which required her to travel extensively and develop and deploy a remarkable range of language skills and cultural competencies in multiple countries, organizations, and activist spaces. This research endeavor is mind-blowing on its own, but it merits particular praise in an era when social science research tends toward experiments and “big data.” Yet, Shih also carefully acknowledges how her various positions and privileges facilitated her vast project, reflecting on how her status as a highly educated Asian-American woman with a US passport helped her access and work in spaces ranging from slave-free jewelry fairs, to FU’s and CR’s shop floors, to the China office of the UN’s Inter-Agency Project on human trafficking, among many others. While she contributed greatly to these sites in various capacities, thereby eschewing an extractive model of research, she also grew deeply critical of many of them (and of CR and FU in particular) in the process. As a result, I could not help but wonder about the afterlife of this book: how have her various interlocutors responded to its interventions, if at all?

My own response is overwhelmingly positive: Manufacturing Freedom shows how deeply engaged qualitative research may enhance our understanding of complex socioeconomic and political issues. In early 2025, social and other media were abuzz with calls to “buy local” and to boycott major retailers such as Amazon and Target for rolling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in response to pressure from the Trump administration. As scholars and activists ponder the efficacy of ethical consumption—to support anti-trafficking initiatives, among other political projects—they will learn many lessons about its promises and perils from Shih’s research.