Journal Publish: Special Issue: Making Unfree Labour: Consent, Exploitation, and the Law
2026-04-13 08:00 - 2026-12-31 17:00 (Asia/Shanghai)
Journal: Innovation In The Social Science
Type: Special Issue
Special Issue Title: Making Unfree Labour: Consent, Exploitation, and the Law
Volume & Issue: Volume 4, Issue 1, 2026
Guest Editor: Ya-Wen Yang
Publisher: Brill
ISSN: 2773-0611
Access: https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/iss.4.issue-1.xml
Articles Included:

Ya-Wen Yang, What Is Wrong with Forced Labour: Coercion or Exploitation? Reflections on Taiwan’s Temporary Migrant Worker Scheme, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 5 (2026), https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p5_2.xml
Fabiana Kutsche & Ulrike Lindner, Between Work Regulation, Integration into the Capitalist Economy and ‘African Laziness’: The International Labour Organization and African Workers, 1927–1930, 3 Innovation in the Social Sciences 31 (2025), https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p31_3.xml
Hao-Yu Cho, Transformation and Exploitation: The Impact of Labor Policies in Mexico’s Maquiladora Industry, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 45 (2026), https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p45_4.xml
Jonathan Parhusip, Johanna Lee & Danielle Douglas, The Kasbon System and the Paradox of Voluntary Entry into Unfree Labor in Taiwan’s Distant Water Fisheries, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 67 (2026), https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p67_5.xml

Introduction: Making Unfree Labour: Consent, Exploitation and the Law
By Guest Editor Ya-Wen Yang
This special issue originated in the workshop ‘The Production and Reproduction of Social Inequalities’, held on 20–21 September 2024 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. One of the workshop’s central themes was the relationship between inequality and exploitation. All the articles in this special issue fall within this broad topic.
More specifically, however, they address the complexities of the conceptualisation of unfree labour through law in particular contexts and historical moments and reflect on the visible and invisible duress that leads to exploitation. They explore how workers’ consent and its absence are managed in the workplace and how efforts to combat forced labour can, paradoxically, perpetuate exploitation.
While the contributors take distinctive approaches to the exploration of a range of case studies, they engage in dialogue with one another on two overarching perspectives. First, they trace the legal expression of unfree labour as it emerges from political contestation. Second, they analyse different techniques used to legitimise institutionalised labour control.
Kutsche and Lindner reveal the early controversies of the International Labour Organization (ILO) during its efforts to combat the forced labour imposed on ‘native labour’ in colonies, which eventually led to ILO Convention No. 29 (1930). The Convention was the first international instrument to tackle forced labour and has been the backbone of the worldwide ban on this inhuman form of labour extraction to this day.
In this regard, the Convention is a political achievement. However, its creation was overshadowed by racism and colonialism. European colonial powers presumed that forcing Africans to work was a civilising mission to educate the locals in a positive work ethic. The legal formation of forced labour reflects the historical limitation that it required the support of the European powers, who relied upon and defended the use of forced labour. It thus focuses on managing direct coercion, while institutions that created economic duress driving indigenous people into poorly paid wage work, such as poll taxes, were largely left untouched.
Yang points out how this limitation underlying the Convention has become a contemporary encumbrance in the fight against human trafficking for labour exploitation in Taiwan. The narrow notion of forced labour led domestic judges ruling on human trafficking cases within the Taiwan–Philippines migration corridor to take migrant workers’ signatures on illegal debt agreements with intermediaries at face value. Migrant workers’ apparent consent, in the eyes of the judges, legitimised the illegal conduct of the intermediaries. This legal reasoning frustrated the initial purpose of Taiwan’s anti-human trafficking law and further consolidated the exploitative fee structure in place throughout the migration process.
Parhusip, Lee and Douglas similarly seek to explain the paradoxical voluntariness of debt-financed migration and the deep-rooted coercion beneath it. They study the pervasiveness and burdens of the debts incurred to finance Indonesian fishers’ migration and personal necessities prior to and during their employment by Taiwanese employers—namely, the kasbon system. Kasbon usually leads to a vicious spiral of debt; an initial debt tricks Indonesian fishers into agreeing to multiple rounds of debt and migration, causing them to submit to abuses in the workplace.
Parhusip et al. observe that the ILO, after a long development, has established the principle of fair recruitment—that migrant workers should not bear the costs and expenses of their migration and employment. The Taiwanese government has also claimed to adhere to this principle under international pressure. However, it has only performed a gesture of governance, issuing formalist bans on illegal fee collections. Meanwhile, the discriminatory laws against migrant fishers, as well as the business model and profit structures of the intermediaries, have been left intact.
Finally, Cho studies the changing dynamics between maquiladora workers and managers in Mexico following the loosening of regulations on dispatched workers in 2012. This legal change led to a surge of such workers, who replaced a high percentage of formally employed factory staff. This, in turn, caused a shift in the management strategies at the author’s field site. The originally more family-like atmosphere on the production line was replaced by the distant relationships that necessarily accompany the nomadic nature of dispatched work. Dispatched workers also found it harder to organise themselves in the workplace. It thus turns out that the regulatory changes that make the workplace more fragmented function as an indirect means of strengthening control over labour.
The four articles represent different intensities of unfreedom on the spectrum of unfree labour. At one pole, Kutsche and Lindner expose the violent oppression and the exploitation of African indigenous communities under European colonialism. At the other, Cho documents factory wage-labourers who experience no direct coercion, despite being threatened by the reserve army of dispatched workers created by neoliberal deregulatory trends.
Between these two poles, Yang and Parhusip et al. highlight the plight of migrant workers. These workers are trapped in the double bind of discriminatory immigration regulations and a snare of debt structures. Because the pole of forced labour under colonialism appears so obviously wrong, other forms of control over labour may appear less harmful, less wrong and ultimately ‘not forced’.
However, the trajectory of long-term efforts to recognise how the institutional deprivation of people’s reasonable options constitutes coercion is precisely the lesson we can learn from the juxtaposition of the case studies here. It is exactly because unfreedom and exploitation can come in different shapes and degrees—and because their recognition is always a political struggle—that we need to analyse how coercion is read as benign and how the law is used to legitimise economic duress as consent. This special issue seeks to do just that.
The original workshop was a collaboration between the International Centre for Cultural Studies (ICCS) at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, the Social Inequalities Research Unit at the University of Cologne and the Africa–China Research Network at Academia Sinica. We thank those whose contributions made this collection possible. Among them are Professor Poe Yu-ze Wan, Chief Editor of this journal, and Professor Joyce C.H. Liu, Director of the ICCS.

Migration, Unequal Citizens, and Critical Legal Studies

This interdisciplinary research cluster belongs to the MOE SPROUT 2.0 “Conflict, Justice, Decolonization 2.0: Asia in Transition in the 21st Century“, operated by the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
According to the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the total number of international migrants had amounted to 272 million in mid-2019, up from 173 million in 2000. Compared to 70 million international migrants in 1960, the figure has increased by 200 million. Among the total number of international migrants, about 100 million international migrants were from Asia, and 83 million were migrating within Asia. Most countries in Asia still practice exclusionary politics of citizenship. The migrant workers and stateless persons suffer severe discrimination and even inhuman treatment because of their non-citizen status.
The first five-year ICCS project, “Unequal Citizens and Legal Reform in the Inter-Asian Context” (2018-2022), has discussed the theme of “Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization” to understand the crux of the problem from the scene of social conflict from the perspective of transnational migration and labor mobility. Our shared concerns include the different forms of social conflict and inequality in third-world countries within the global context. We paid particular attention to the issues of refugees, mobile laborers, stateless persons, and human trafficking under mass migration. We discussed the formation of severely excluded discrimination, oppression, and violence as expressed in laws and institutions in different societies. However, the international labor migration under globalization constantly faces exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking, particularly in Asia-Pacific.
The second five-year project (2023-2027) will focus on analyzing the forced labor risks in the global supply chain and addressing effective practices for eliminating forced labor, including law enforcement strategy. Our project will continue to deepen the transnational cooperation with research institutions, research scholars, and non-governmental organizations to develop more significant contributions to labor rights and access to justice for migrant workers, stateless populations, and undocumented workers. We orient our project toward a critical legal study in terms of empirical cases and emancipatory articulation of particular fundamental concepts, including citizenship.
