In The Banality of Good, Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Faier draws from interviews with NGO caseworkers and government officials to demonstrate how these efforts disregard the needs and perspectives of those they are designed to help. She finds that these campaigns tend to privilege bureaucracies and institutional compliance, resulting in the compromised quality of life, repatriation, and even criminalization of human trafficking survivors. Faier expands on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil” by coining the titular “banality of good” to describe the reality of the UN’s fight against human trafficking. Detailing the protocols that have been put in place and evaluating their enactment, Faier reveals how the continued failure of humanitarian institutions to address structural inequities and colonial history ultimately reinforces the violent status quo they claim to be working to change.

Lieba Faier is Associate Professor of Geography and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan.

Abbreviations  ix
Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction  1
1. A Global Solution  25
2. The Protocol’s Compromises  51
3. The Institutional Life of Suffering  75
4. “To Promote the Universal Values of Human Dignity,” a Roadmap  97
5. Banal Justice  121
6. The Need to Know  143
7. Funding Frustration  163
8. Cruel Empowerment  185
Conclusion. The Misperformance of the Trafficking Protocol, or the Less Things Change the More They Stay the Same  207
Notes  217
Bibliography  271
Index  303