The Rescue Machine Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking, and Extraterritorial Carceral Power in Southeast Asia. A Theoretical Synthesis

This paper develops a theoretical synthesis of sex work and anti-trafficking power in Southeast Asia and argues that the region reveals US extraterritorial power in its fourth and most contradictory mode. Where a companion paper on the Global North found that power exercised through platform law (FOSTA-SESTA), a paper on the Global South through the PEPFAR antiprostitution pledge, and a paper on Eastern Europe through the abrupt withdrawal of funding, Southeast Asia shows it as evaluative power: the US State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report ranks governments by tier and can trigger sanctions, rewarding the criminalisation, raids and rescue operations that Bernstein (2018) has theorised as carceral feminism and militarised humanitarianism. The paradox is that the same US power that financed harm reduction through PEPFAR simultaneously incentivises criminalisation through the TIP Report - while the strongest available evidence, a quasi-experimental study from East Java (Cameron, Seager and Shah 2021), shows that criminalisation increases sexually transmitted infections among sex workers by 58 percent. Drawing on this evidence, on Weitzer's (2023) ethnography of the Thai sex industry, and on Parmanand's (2019) study of the Philippine Sex Workers Collective, the paper makes three claims. First, the anti-trafficking architecture functions as a machine that produces the victims it claims to rescue, extending Agustin's (2007) concept of the rescue industry into its operating logic. Second, this machine structurally suffocates the self-organisation that could carry reform, because criminalisation prevents legal registration and funding. Third, Thailand's ongoing effort to repeal its 1996 Prostitution Act is the Southeast Asian counterpart to the Belgian and South African experiments, in which the sex worker organisation Empower explicitly demands decriminalisation rather than regulated legalisation. The evidence base is uneven: Thailand and the Philippines carry the analysis, while Vietnam appears only as an evidencebased contextual case.