By the late 1990s, a third avenue for global feminist intervention became available when foreign ministries, after many years of feminist advocacy, grew concerned with the trafficking in persons, especially women and children. For many U. S. and European governments, the issue emerged as a practical problem as the number of prostitutes/sex workers from Southeast Asia and postcommunist Europe increased dramatically, as did the involvement of organized crime. With the 2004 EU enlargement, the European Union became more concerned about porous borders, especially in new postcommunist members, and the longer borders with Russia. This realpolitik concern led them to begin to fund organizations working against trafficking in Europe and Eurasia. The cross-Atlantic interest created the political will to push the United Nations to debate and pass a protocol on “Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children” in 2000.
U. S. interest became particularly strong after 2000. Following mounting pressure from both the political left and right, the U. S. Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000.1 This and subsequent legislation appropriated substantial funding to support antitrafficking initiatives abroad, contributing the overwhelming majority of funds to combat trafficking in Russia (Abubikirova 2002). Some of this money was dispersed through the usual development channels, such as the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), a long-time funder of international exchanges. As such, the funding risked the same problems as the alliance with development donors.
Under the Bush administration, the legislation meant a new State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, a new and distinct mechanism for intervention. This office was led not by human rights or feminist activists, but by others with different agendas (see chapter 6). Although the United States is perhaps the most extreme case, this was also true of other states’ (and the EU’s) foreign ministries and the justice ministries that were also brought into the intervention. In contrast to human rights organizations, development agencies, and large charitable foundations that have become more responsive to feminist concerns and inclusive of feminist activists, these so-called power ministries have been particularly resistant to feminist critiques, even to women leaders. In other words, while working with the former entities could be construed as an alliance, foreign ministries tended to preempt global feminist concerns, taking them over with little feminist input.2 More so than for the first two types, this intervention also risked neoimperialism. These power ministries, with access to all sorts of means of coercion, had no credible commitment to norms of inclusivity.
transplanting global feminism, 1993-1997
Over the last decade and a half, foreigners, most often led by Americans, have attempted each of these interventions in Russia, and all have had impact on feminist mobilization. Following the lead of Russian activists-scholars (Brygalina and Temkina 2004; Pashina 2004),3 I contend that the women’s crisis movement developed in four basic stages (see table 3.1): (1) the founding of the movement, (2) the institutionalization of the crisis center as the movement organization, (3) the proliferation of crisis centers, and (4) transformation.