Cruel Empowerment

Abstract

Chapter 8 examines a UN project aimed at empowering trafficking survivors that was funded by the Japanese-government-sponsored UN Trust Fund for Human Security (UNTFHS) and administered by the International Labour Organization (ILO) between 2006 and 2009. It contrasts this project with the Women Empowerment Program (WEP), independently pioneered by a grassroots NGO in the Philippines that was also subcontracted by the UNTFHS-ILO program. The juxtaposition reveals the cruelty of the approach to empowerment taken by the UNTFHS-ILO Empowerment Project, which thoughtlessly ignored the structural vulnerabilities of migrants’ lives and thereby created, in Lauren Berlant’s words, “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility.” The chapter argues that whereas the UNTFHS-ILO unthinkingly celebrated individual empowerment as an end unto itself, the WEP self-consciously incorporated the limits of its personal empowerment project into a broader vision of political activism and community building ultimately aimed at necessary social transformation and structural change.