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Securitizing Complacency: State and Economic Security, and the Displacement of Human Security in the Transnational Framework on Human Trafficking - A Case Study of Thailand

Author(s) Olivia M. Pfaff
Country United Kingdom
Abstract Abstract
Human trafficking remains one of the most pervasive violations of international human rights law, yet the transnational legal framework designed to combat it is systematically undermined by state complacency. This paper argues that this complacency is best understood through securitization theory: state and economic security are consistently protected as binding legal obligations within the transnational framework, while human security remains discretionary, displaced by a security hierarchy the framework itself constructs. Analysing the Palermo Protocol, the Warsaw Convention, the Geneva Slavery Convention, and the Migrant Smuggling Protocol, this paper argues that enforcement mechanisms remain oriented toward border security rather than victim identification, enabling states to strategically reclassify trafficking victims as irregular migrants. Thailand's economic entanglement with trafficking-adjacent industries, from regional sex tourism to Southeast Asia's forced-labour scam-compound economy, is examined as this paper's central case study of securitized economic priority in practice. The paper further argues that unilateral aid-conditionality mechanisms, such as the United States' Trafficking in Persons tier system, do not remedy this failure but reproduce it, operating within a category of unilateral state action that international law itself treats as largely unlawful. Adopting a qualitative doctrinal methodology, informed by the author's observations during fieldwork in Thailand, this paper concludes that without binding identification
obligations and enforceable protection standards, the transnational legal framework will continue to function as a securitized mechanism of state and economic protection rather than a human rights instrument.
Keywords Human Trafficking, Securitization, Human Security, Economic Security, Thailand, Palermo Protocol, Migrant Smuggling Protocol, Transnational Law.
Field Sociology > Intelligence / Security
Published In Volume 7, Issue 8, August 2026
Published On 2026-08-10
DOI https://doi.org/10.70528/IJLRP.v7.i8.2343
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