New Books in Anthropology22 Jun 2025

Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024)

In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. 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, Dr. 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.

Dr. 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, Dr. 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.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Episoder(600)

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6 Sep 1h 2min

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

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5 Sep 54min

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4 Sep 54min

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

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