Richard Re

About the author: Richard Re is a senior editor at the Harvard International Review, a quarterly journal of international relations.

Slavery today is an international problem. A decades-old civil war in Sudan has resulted in government-sanctioned kidnapping and enslavement of thousands of Sudanese. In addition, poor women and children from countries such as Thailand and Nigeria are lured into sex slavery by false offers of lucrative jobs in foreign countries. In order to combat the problem of slavery, world leaders must work to address its underlying causes—poverty, corrupt national governments, and unenforceable antislavery legislation.

Slavery has not been abolished. Although centuries of struggle and sacrifice on the part of anti-slavery activists have successfully made slavery illegal under international law, abolitionism triumph remains incomplete in reality. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 27 million...