Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, has won the 2011 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $100,000 this year.
The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Ending Slavery, the most recent book published by Bales with University of California Press:
In the book, Bales outlines steps to end the enslavement of some 27 million people worldwide. Slavery and human trafficking are tightly interwoven into the modern global economy, so new political and economic policies must be enacted to suppress them, he says.
Slavery, illegal in every country but still widely practiced, can be stopped within 30 years at a cost of less than $20 billion, a much cheaper price tag than most other social problems, he argues…
“Bales lays out an urgent human challenge, offers ways to make a difference and challenges the reader to become part of the solution,” award jurors said.
Since 2001, Bales’ group has liberated thousands of slaves in India, Nepal, Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, Ivory Coast and Bangladesh.
The Chronicle of Higher Education covered the story, as did the local Louisville Courier Journal and other news outlets. This is from the local paper:
[Bales] estimates that modern slavery puts tens of billions of dollars worth of products into the global economy each year. And while every country has laws against slavery, some don’t enforce them or provide few resources to fight it.
Bales’ ideas for suppressing it involve a mix of tightening government enforcement on illegal trafficking; enacting new policies for businesses that identify when slavery is connected to global supply chains; and adding more grassroots efforts to help free groups of slaves — and then help them get basic skills to avoid such traps again.
Bales said individuals can also help by buying Fair Trade goods and choosing socially responsible investment options.
“There’s no magic bullet,” Bales said. “But there is a box of magic bullets,”
Bales was trained as a sociologist at LSE, but IR theorists interested in norm construction, human rights, and/or scholarly activism will want to check out the award-winning book, as well as other scholarship Bales has produced on this topic.
Disclosure: I chair the Department Committee that overseas the administration of this prize. This entails soliciting external book reviews, chairing a first-round screening committee, bringing together a panel of experts to evaluate and rank a set of semi-finalists, and making sure that the information gleaned from these processes is advanced to a Final Selection Committee.
I discuss this award a bit more on my blog — and provide a video of Bales talking at TED in 2010. IR theorists have long used the past prohibition of slavery as an exemplar for other normative developments — such as the end of war, or bans on various state activities.
I notice that both this year and last year's Gravemeyer winner worked in advocacy groups/NGOs (although both have PhDs). Does this mean that policy-oriented works is better valued for awards like this than strictly theoretical ones? Just curious.
We've often given the award to scholars for their academic work. I believe it is merely coincidence that the past two winners work for advocacy groups. A similar coincidence occurred earlier this decade. Fiona Terry, the 2006 winner, worked for service organization (Doctors Wtihout Borders and ICRC). 2005 winner Francis Deng has often worked at the UN while coauthor Roberta Cohen worked at Brookings. However, the 2007 through 2009 winners were all academics working in university settings. I'm not sure “strictly theoretical” works easily meet the award criteria.