Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales "is the world's leading expert on modern slavery and President of Free the Slaves. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Roehampton University in London, and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Cocoa Initiative.
"Bales's book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy published in 1999, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and has now been published in ten other languages. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it "a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing expose of modern slavery". A revised edition was published in 2005. This book was based on the first-hand in-depth study of five slave-based "businesses" in five different countries: Thailand (prostitution); Mauritania (water selling); Brazil (charcoal production); India (agriculture); and Pakistan (brick making).
"Bales is a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. He has been invited to advise the US, British, Irish, Norwegian, and Nepali governments, as well as the governments of the Economic Community of West African States, on the formulation of policy on slavery and human trafficking. He recently edited an Anti-Human Trafficking Toolkit for the United Nations, and published, with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley, a report on forced labor in the USA." [1]
In 2007 he wrote the introduction for Martin Bunzl's and Kwame Anthony Appiah's edited book Buying Freedom: The Ethics and Economics of Slave Redemption (Princeton University Press, 2007).
