From Enemies to Slaves?

Abstract Chapter 1 introduces the reader to what, on the face of it, appears as one of the most astonishing developments in British policy making and law: the discovery of domestic drug dealers no longer as enemy populations to be policed under the government’s ‘war on gangs’, but as ‘modern slaves’ in need of care. This discovery lies at the heart of official constructions of, and policing responses to, an identified national crisis of ‘county lines’—the name given to expanding regional drugs networks of heroin and crack cocaine that rely on teenagers and young adults to transport and sell the drugs. While the tale from ‘enemies to slaves’ has commonly been seen as a departure from punitive statecraft, this chapter introduces a more complicated story: one that centres the persistent realities of state racism and colonial afterlives in the law, foregrounds the social suffering that Black, minoritized, and working-class communities confront, and reconceives of the state’s discovery of modern slavery on ‘home soil’ not just as a juridical development but as a political project-in-the-making. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the challenges of doing advocacy-based ethnography in a situation where the state’s moral impetus to do ‘good’ remains out of sync with the lived realities and struggles at the grassroots.