This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the social, economic, and political drivers of slavery and human trafficking within the Horn of Africa in order to show how different development policies could lead to longer-term solutions. In so doing, it addresses a matter is of critical urgency that is too-often overlooked, misunderstood, or neglected.

Here Roy Love explains the historical context, flags ambiguities within the legal terminology, and sheds new light on the key drivers such as changing patterns in rural-urban migration, increasing population displacement due to recurrent conflict and climate change, and changing trends in the business practices of traffickers. Along the way, Love offers some much-needed conceptual clarity by drawing important distinctions between modern slavery and human trafficking; between the trafficking of adults and the trafficking of children; between how perpetrators and victims are commonly gendered and what the evidence shows; and between received theories of economic and sustainable development and what actually plays out on the ground. Ultimately, Love shows that a long-term solution will come only when we are able to understand these issues clearly and thus revise some core assumptions prevalent within current discourses around development in the Horn.