The colonisation of anti-trafficking in the Commonwealth Caribbean

The Commonwealth Caribbean has a history of being ‘governed from outside’. While colonisation is usually associated with European metropoles, this paper argues that the Caribbean anti-trafficking in persons field has been subject to the US government as a neo-coloniser. This exogenous influence harms more than it helps. The article shows how vulnerable the region is to US dictates through financing and soft power. To solidify this argument, the work applies post-colonial discourse analysis to empirical fieldwork and anti-trafficking campaigns. The paper concludes that the region must extricate itself from this dependency using a more Caribbean-centric approach to address trafficking in persons.